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FIRST STEPS 

IN 

ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



BY 

ARTHUR OILMAN, A. M. 

li 



Th^ love of letters is friendly to sober manners and virttwus conduct^ 
which in every profession is the road to success and to respect,'''' 




NEW YORK 
PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON, 

13 AsTOR Place, and 136 Eighth Street. 

H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY, 

Riverside Press, Cambridge. 

1870. 




Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by 

Arthur Oilman, A. M.. 
in the office of the Librarian'of Congress at Washington. 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 
STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED 
H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



BY 



PREFACE. 



HIS book is the result of a long-cherished 
desire to furnish a guide to those entering 
! upon the fascinating study of the Literature 
of the English Language. 

It is proposed to present, in as small compass as 
possible, a comprehensive view of the great field ; 
to trace the stages of growth through which our 
literature has passed ; and, so far as may be, \ to 
point out the influences which have caused the 
fruit of this growth to take now one form, now 
another. 

To accomplish these ends it is necessary to con- 
sider the early history of Great Britain, and of our 
own country, and the terms used by writers on lan- 
guage and literature. It is also requisite to learn 
somewhat of the authors who have written at the 
different periods, and whose works mark the growth. 

It is not a necessity that we know something 
about all the writers, nor that we know all about 
those of whom we must know something. 

Our situation may be compared to that of one 




iv 



English Literature, 



who has just entered upon an estate containing a 
diversity of trees, shrubs, flowers, and ripening 
grains, distributed over pleasant meadows, by the 
banks of flowing streams, among charming valleys, 
and on the smiling hill-sides. 

Such a one by his first steps will accomplish 
little more than learn the outlines of the principal 
fields, and the bearings of the most beaten paths. 
From the hill-tops he may now and then take a 
survey of a considerable portion at a single view — 
may mark the position of the taller trees or of some 
of the other extraordinary features of the landscape. 
Many of the greatest charms will probably elude 
his sight, but he will not consider his time lost if 
he acquire such an idea of his estate as will beget 
a love for it, and lead him to other walks which 
may develop hidden beauties of the existence of 
which he was at first unaware. 

Thus we shall find our English literature a vast 
field of varied charms, of which every portion will 
repay cultivation. After having learned its general 
outlines we may continue our study in any part — 
no matter how closely we restrict ourselves — with 
the assurance that the more exact our observation, 
the greater shall be our pleasure and the more en- 
during our reward. 

Let us enter upon the pursuit with love, put- 
ting our hearts into the work, remembering that 
our noble literature is an inheritance from the 



Preface, 



V 



fathers — an inheritance that we, the children, 
ought to prize, honor, and cultivate ! 



Note. — The author's impression that there was room in 
the long list of American text-books for one constructed upon 
the plan he has attempted to carry out, has been greatly 
strengthened by his frequent examinations of schools of vari- 
ous grades in widely separated parts of our land, no less than 
by expressions which have fallen from the lips of educators 
whose views are entitled to consideration. 

In attempting to supply the demand indicated, the author 
has intended to avail himself freely of the labors of standard 
writers on the English literature and language, and to furnish 
a text-book adapted to precede any of those now in use. In 
the compilation, special use has been made of the writings of 
Professor Morley, of the University College, London ; of Dr. 
Craik, of Queen's College, Belfast ; of Thomas Arnold, of 
University College, Oxford ; of Joseph Payne, of the Philo- 
logical Society of England ; of Max Miiller, Fellow of All 
Souls College, Oxford ; of Professor William Dwight Whit- 
ney, LL. D., of Yale College ; of the late Professor Shaw, 
formerly Lector of English Literature at the University of 
St. Petersburg; of George' P. Marsh, LL. D. ; and of many 
other authors, some of whom are mentioned in the text. It 
has, however, not been deemed wise, in an elementary work 
of this kind, to encumber the pages with references to au- 
thorities, which would be little used by those for whom the 
book is intended. In fact it would be almost impracticable to 
do this, so thoroughly has the author been obliged to condense, 
modify, and rearrange his materials. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Preface 3 

Chapter I. Historical. 9 

Chapter II. Definition of Terms 16 

•Chapter III. Languages of Europe 23 

Chart showing the Languages of Europe 23 

PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
I. PERIOD OF IMMATURE ENGLISH. 

Chart of Period 30 

Chapter IV. Original English ; previous to 1150 . . . 30 

Chapter V. Broken English, 11 50- 1250 37 

Chapter VI. Dead English, 1250-1350 45 

Chapter VII. Reviving English, 1350-1558 49 

II. PERIOD OF MATURE ENGLISH. 

Chart of Period 67 

Chapter VIII. The Italian Influence, 1 558-1649 67 

Chapter IX. The Puritan Influence, 1649-1660 83 

Chapter X. The French Influence, 1660-1700 96 

Chapters XI.-XIV. The People's Influence 112-203 

Chapter XL The Age of Pope, 1 700-1 745 112 

Chapter XII. The Age of Johnson, 1 745-1800 118 

Chapter XIII. The Age of Poetical Romance, 1800- 

1830 144 

Chapter XIV. The Age of Prose Romance, 1830- 

1870 164 

Bibliography 204 

Hints at Explanation of Titles, Pronunciation, etc 220 

Index 222 




ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



CHAPTER I. 

HISTORICAL. 

j]N order to understand the English Lan- 
guage and Literature thoroughly, we need a 
certain familiarity with the geography and 
history of England, and other parts of Europe. 

We see, by reference to the map, that England 
is a division of the British Isles, which lie off the 
western coast of the continent of Europe, only 
separated from it by a narrow channel. The further 
back we carry our investigation into its history, the 
slower and more difficult our progress becomes. 
One reason of this is, that the language has changed 
so much that it is as difficult to read as French or 
Latin, or any other foreign tongue. A second rea- 
son is, that very many of the early records are lost. 

We know, however, that two thousand years ago 
Great Britain was inhabited by a rude race called 
Celts. These were descendants of savage tribes 
that had come into Europe from Asia at so early a 



10 



English Literature. 



period that history gives us no account of the mi- 
gration.^ 

Four hundred years before • Christ, a branch of 
this people came in conflict with the powerful Ro- 
man nation, and, after considerable hard fighting, 
sacked the city of Rome. Two hundred and fifty 
years later another branch attacked the northwest- 
ern frontier of the same empire, and was so thor- 
oughly defeated as never again to be heard of as 
a conquering people. 

Fifty-five years before Christ, Julius Csesar crossed 
from Gaul into Britain, and, after some battles, 
received the allegiance of the tribes in the southern 
part of the island. For three hundred and fifty 
years the Romans nominally ruled Britain, but their 
hold upon the government was neither strong nor 
without interruptions.*-^ 

About four hundred years after Christ, the Goths 
under Alaric, aided by the Vandals, attacked and 
overthrew the city of Rome, and thus compelled 
the withdrawal of all Roman forces. The estab- 
lishment of Christianity was retarded, and the peo- 
ple relapsed into barbarism and druidical idolatry. 

Not long after the departure of the Romans, the 
Saxon element was introduced. Warriors from 
parts of Europe now included in German territory 
invaded the island, and, after a struggle, overcame 
the natives, and established what is known as the 
Saxon Heptarchy. This period is full of romance. 

1 Freeman's Old English History^ ch. i. ^ /^/^. ch. ii. 



Historical, 



II 



The stories of King Arthur and his knights of the 
Round Table belong to it, and it is strongly sus- 
pected that Hengist and Horsa, who are said to 
have led the Saxon invaders, were mythical crea- 
tions of some unknown bard. 

In the year 827, one of the kings of the Heptar- 
chy, Egbert of Wessex, obtained control of all the 
kingdoms, and, uniting them under one government, 
called it Engleland or England, and himself Rex 
gentis Anglorum, or king of the English people. 

Matters continued in this state until 1013, when 
the Danes, after having made many vain efforts, 
put the English king to flight, and obtained con- 
trol of the government. They held the power 
twenty-eight years. In the year 1041, however, 
the Saxons again obtained control of the govern- 
ment, and held it for twenty-five years. 

In 1066 the Normans came over from Normandy, 
just across the channel, under the lead of Duke 
William, now called the Conqueror. They met the 
Saxons under King Harold at Senlac, near Hast- 
ings, which is in Sussex, about seventy miles south- 
east of London. The night before the battle the 
Normans prayed in silence, and the Saxons sat 
about their blazing camp-fires eating and drinking, 
and singing the merry songs of their fathers. In 
the battle of the next day the Saxons were dis- 
persed, and though fifteen thousand Normans were 
killed, Duke William had conquered, and became 
the first of a line of Norman monarchs. Since this 



12 English Literature, 

time the government of England has never been 
overthrown by foreign foes. 

The Normans ruled from 1066 to 1154, and then 
Henry II., surnamed Plantagenet, the most power- 
ful monarch of the time, ascended the throne. 
There were fourteen kings in this celebrated line, 
of whom the last was Richard III., who was killed 
at the battle of Bos worth Field, in 1485. Among 
these was Edward III., who began to reign in 1327, 
subdued Scotland, invaded France, and in connec- 
tion with his son, the Black Prince^ fought the 
famous battle of Cressy in 1346. The Black 
Prince died before his father, leaving a son, who, 
ill 1377? became King Richard II. During his 
reign our great poet Chaucer flourished, and John 
Wiclif, the herald of the Reformation, died. 

After him came Henry IV., of the house of Lan- 
caster, whose reign was full of disturbances. He 
was succeeded by Henry V., who conquered France, 
after the battles of Harfleur and Agincourt. This 
reign was also very stormy. The French wars con- 
tinued, and the Maid of Orleans led the French 
army from victory to victory, and though she was 
captured and inhumanly burned to death by the 
English, her countrymen regained their territory. 
Insurrections and conspiracies were rife in Brit- 
ain, and at the end of Henry VI. reign the crown 
passed to the house of York in the person of Ed- 
ward IV. During his reign the first printing-press 
was set up in England, by William Caxton. 



Historical. 



13 



Richard III. closed the line of Plantagenets, and 
the strife between the houses of York and Lancas- 
ter, called the Wars of the Roses, which for forty 
years had distracted the kingdom, ceased. Many 
colleges and schools were founded at this period, 
books were a little more extensively circulated, and 
the language became more refined and uniform. 

The line of Plantagenets, and the houses of Lan- 
caster and York, were succeeded by the house of 
Tudor, which gave England five of her most illus- 
trious sovereigns. Henry VII. was the first, and 
Queen Elizabeth was the last of this line. The 
period of the rule of the house of Tudor includes 
the time of the discovery of America by Columbus 
in 1492, many religious disturbances, and the lives 
of some of the most remarkable authors of whom 
we shall have to speak. 

James I., son of Mary Queen of Scots, became 
king at the death of Elizabeth. He began the 
Stuart dynasty in England, being descended, as 
was claimed, from a son of Banquo, who was mur- 
dered by Macbeth in the eleventh century. To 
this family belonged, also, Charles I. and II., and 
James II., the last of whom was dethroned in 1689. 
The rule of the Stuarts was interrupted by what is 
called the period of the Commonwealth, This ex- 
tended from 1649 to 1660, during which time the 
Puritans or Roundheads under Oliver Cromwell 
obtained ascendency over the Royalists or Cava- 
liers under Charles I., and having beheaded that 



14 



English Literature. 



\ 



king, governed the country with great strictness, 
until the restoration of the royal family in the 
person of Charles II. During the reign of the 
Stuarts the settlements at Jamestown in Virginia, 
and at Plymouth in Massachusetts, were made in 
America, 

The reign of James II. was marked by so many 
horrors, owing specially to the ferocious deeds of 
Judge Jeffreys, that it has been called the Reign of 
Terror. It ended with the dethronement of the 
king, and the establishment of the joint house of 
Stuart and Nassau. 

Mary, daughter of James II., had married Wil- 
liam, Prince of Orange, and in 1689 this couple 
was called to the throne. During their reign, which 
was marked by war and treachery, the present 
heavy national debt of England was begun. In 
1702 William died, and the sceptre fell to Anne, a 
sister of his wife. During her reign the brilliant 
campaigns of the Duke of Marlborough occurred, 
England and Scotland were permanently united, 
and so many superior literary productions appeared 
that Oliver Goldsmith called it the Augustan Age 
of English literature. 

In 1 7 14 the present house of Brunswick began 
to reign in the person of George I., who was a great 
grandson of James I. He was followed by George 
II. and III., who each had stormy reigns. Dur- 
ing the latter the war of the American Revolution 
occurred, and subsequently the War of 18 12, for 



Historical, 



IS 



George III. ruled sixty years. During the same 
period, also, Napoleon Bonaparte revolutionized the 
politics of Europe. 

George IV. reigned from 1820 to 1830, and was 
followed by his brother, William IV., who died in 
1837, when Victoria I., a granddaughter of George 
III., ascended the throne at the age of eighteen, 
and England was at peace with all the world. 



CHAPTER 11. 




DEFINITION OF TERMS. 

8NGLAND was known to the Romans as 
Britannia, and also as Anglia. The latter 
name is said to have been derived from 
Angeln in Schleswig. x\ngeln is a little tract of 
country laid down on the map of Denmark. It is 
bounded on the east by the Baltic Sea, on the north 
by Flensburg Bay, and on the south by the river 
Schley. It is not known when the first emigrants 
from the land of the Teutons came into Britain, nor 
is it supposed that they all came from Angeln. A 
number of different tribes were undoubtedly in- 
volved in the movernent, but the Angles took a 
greater part of the land than any of the others, and 
therefore the whole country took their name in the 
end. 

The Celts lived in Britain and on the continent, 
at the earliest known peribd. Julius Caesar called 
them Gauls in one branch, and Belgians in another. 
They were also called Cimbrians. The Gaels of 
Scotland, Ireland, and Wales represent other 
branches of the Celts. 

Aiiglo-Saxon is a modern term used to designate 



Definition of Terms, 



17 



in a general way all the Teutonic settlers in Britain. 
The Teutonic race, which originated in Asia, is 
divided into three branches. 

I. The first branch is mainly composed of the 
Teutonic inhabitants of upper and middle Germany, 
Switzerland, and Hungary. 

II. The second is called the Saxo7t branch, and 
includes the Frisians, Old Saxons, or Low Germans, 
the Dutch, Flemings, and Saxons of Transylvania, 
the English, Scotch, and most of the inhabitants of 
the United States. 

III. The third is the Scandinavian branch, and 
includes the Swedes, Norwegians, Icelanders, and 
Danes. 

The word Teuton is only another form of our 
word Dutch, and has always been applied to those 
we call Germans. It is derived from Tuisco, a 
god or hero whom that people considered their 
common ancestor. 

The yutes are a wide-spread branch of the Teu- 
tonic race which inhabited the irregular peninsula 
of Jutland, bounded by the North Sea, the Skager- 
Rack, and the Baltic. The present kingdom of 
Denmark covers nearly the same territory. 

Frisia is the ancient name of the most northerly 
division of Holland, now called Friesland. The 
name was also applied to a portion of Hanover 
about Aurich. 



i8 



Eftglish Literature, 



Literature is — excluding the recorded knowledge 
of the positive sciences — the entire result of knowl- 
edge and fancy reduced to writing. Literature 
proper is addressed to man as man, and is catholic, 
universal, not exclusive. It is adapted to strengthen 
rather than to store the mind. A treatise on arith- 
metic or geometry is, therefore, not a part of liter- 
ature proper, for it does not appeal to its readers 
as men, but as students in the pursuit of knowledge 
of a special kind. The works of Shakespeare, on 
the other hand, do belong to literature, because 
they appeal to us all as human beings,, and not to 
any class of men in particular. Literature is found 
in many different languages. This book treats 
only of that found in the English language. 

Linguistics is the science that treats of languages, 
and a person skilled in languages is called a lin- 
guist. 

Philology is the study of the words of a language. 
It is a term used by different authors in different 
significations. It was originally applied in Ger- 
many to the study of the languages of Greece and 
Rome, as a means of general culture. Dr. Samuel 
Johnson defined it criticism^ grammatical learnings 
in which sense it includes, — 

I. Etymology^ or the science of the origin of 
words ; 

II. Grammar^ or the science of the construction 
of language or languages ; and 

III. That part of Literary Criticism which inves- 



Definition of Terms. 



19 



tigates the merits or demerits of style or diction, 
as compared with a received standard. 

Comparative Philology^ more properly called the: 
Science of Language^ is the science which treats of 
the laws and properties of all languages. 

We find that English Literature takes either the 
form of Prose or Verse^ each of which general divis- 
ions is subdivided into other classes. 

Poets are those writers who so combine the ma- 
terials of the natural and moral world, as to pre- 
sent them in new shapes, or in unaccustomed or 
affecting points of view, and in metrical language. 

Prose Writers are those who produce composi- 
tion not in verse, and without metre or poetic 
measure. 

Verse is at a very early period in the history of" 
our literature found in the form of 

Lyrics^ so called, because among the ancients, 
they were sung to the lyre. The name is now 
applied to poetry suitable for music, which is gen- 
erally the earnest expression of the composer's 
thoughts and feelings. In this class are, — 

1. Ballads.^ which are either sentimental songs,, 
light poems, or lyric tales in verse. 

2. Pastorals^ or poems descriptive of shepherds^ 
or their occupations, or of country life. Idyls are 
properly pastorals, though the name is frequently 
given to highly wrought descriptive poems, on other 
subjects. 

3. Odes^ or short lyrics that express sentiment, 
but do not generally admit of narrative. 



20 



English Literature. 



4. Hymns^ or lyrics intended for singing in re- 
ligious service, though they are not always adapted 
to music. It is said that a complete hymn should 
consist of a central creative thought shaping itself 
into melodious utterance, with every detail subor- 
dinated to its clear and harmonious presentation. 

5. Elegies^ or poetical compositions of a mourn- 
ful character. 

Epics are considered the highest style of poetry. 
They relate the history of real or imaginary events 
oi elevated character. Where the theme is not an 
action but a hero, it is called a Heroic poem. Among 
•the world's epics are Homer's Iliad^ Virgil's JEneid^ 
JDante's Divina Commedia, and Milton's Paradise 
Eost, 

Dramatic Poetry is that in which the action or 
narrative is not related, but represented. It is 
found in the form of Tragedy^ in which the human 
passions and the woes and misfortunes of life are 
represented in such a manner as to excite grief, 
pity, indignation, or horror ; and of Comedy, in 
which the lighter faults, passions, and follies of 
mankind are represented. 



The productions of Prose writers may be consid- 
ered in four principal divisions. 

I. History^ or the narration of past events. Phil- 
osophical or universal history is that which seeks 



Definition of Terms, 



21 



the laws of human events, the principle which de- 
velops nations and civilizations, and the forces 
which move the world onward to its destiny. Bun- 
sen says it is " that most sacred epic or dramatic 
poem, of which God is the poet, humanity the hero, 
and the historian the philosophical interpreter." 
Under this head we must consider — 

1. Annals^ in which past events are digested in 
series according to years. 

2. Biography^ or the history of the life of indi- 
viduals. 

3. Travel^ or the history of occurrences or obser- 
vations in a journey or travel. 

II. Fiction^ under which we may include all liter- 
ature of the imagination and fancy. It includes — 

1. The Novell which is longer than a fable, pre- 
sents a plot and a number of characters, and gener- 
ally treats of occurrences and manners of recent 
times. 

2. The Romance^ which treats of wild adventure, 
generally of a remote period, especially of the age 
of chivalry, and usually connected with love or war. 
Romances are so called because first written in 
the Romance languages. The earliest were founded 
upon the lives and deeds of King Arthur and the 
Emperor Charlemagne. 

3. Dramatic Prose, which is of the same nature 
as dramatic verse. 

III. Oratory, as a division of literature, includes 
compositions of an argumentative or persuasive 



22 



English Literature. 



character usually intended for oral delivery. It 
includes — 

1. Sacred Oratory^ or that which treats of rhetor- 
ical compositions intended for delivery from the 
pulpit. 

2. Forensic Oratory^ treating of those delivered 
in courts of law. 

3. Deliberative Oratory^ treating of those pro- 
nounced in deliberative bodies. 

IV. Scientific Frose is that which relates to 
knowledge methodically digested or arranged. We 
may consider it under three divisions. 

1. Theology^ which includes all that relates to 
the existence, nature, and attributes of God, and 
of his relations to man. 

2. Metaphysics y which treats of the philosophy 
of the mind. 

3. Fhysics, which treats of all things which exist 
independent of the mind's conception of them. 



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CHAPTER III. 



LANGUAGES OF EUROPE. PERIODS OF ENGLISH LIT- 
ERATURE. 

^^^^-HE principal languages of Europe maybe 

^E^^l divided into five classes. 

■^•^^1 I. The Celtic^ now found only in the 
Highlands of Scotland, the wildest parts of Ireland, 
the Isle of Man, the mountainous regions of Wales 
and Cornwall, and in Brittany. The Celts led in 
the early emigrations from the East, and their lan- 
guage, after having crossed over the whole Euro- 
pean continent, is now only found lingering on its 
extreme western borders, where it is year by year 
losing its claim to be considered a living speech. 

II. The Romanic^ which is found in Italy, France, 
Spain, and Portugal. These are so called, because 
they originated in the language of the ancient Ro- 
mans, and they exhibit evident traces of their Latin 
origin. 

III. The Gothic^ called also Germanic, or Teu- 
tonic. This class includes the languages of Nor- 
way, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland, which are 
called Norse, or Scandinavian j the English ; the 
Frisic, only found in the Netherlands, and which 



24 Languages of Europe. 



is not used in books ; the Flemish and Dutch ; and 
the German proper. 

IV. The Slavonic^ of which the principal divis- 
ions are the Russian and Polish. This class covers 
a vast extent of country in Europe, Asia, and North 
America. 

V. The Uralic^ used by the Finns, Hungarians, 
and Laplanders. It receives its name from the 
Ural Mountains, and extends into Asia. 

A glance at the map of Europe will show that 
the migrations of the nations have pushed the Celtic 
languages to the extreme western verge of that con- 
tinent ; that the Romanic are confined to the south- 
ern part ; the Slavonic to the eastern ; and the 
Uralic to the northern countries j while the great 
central portion is occupied by nations speaking the 
Gothic tongues. This distribution of languages is 
not an arrangement of man, but the fulfillment of a 
design which has governed the movements of na- 
tions for many generations. 

Turning now to the branch of the Gothic lan- 
guage which we use, we find that its literature, 
which is the expression of the national mind, has at 
different periods considerably varied in its form. 
This does not imply any change in its character, for 
that was thoroughly English in its underlying na- 
ture all the while. 

Let us now inquire what these changes of form 
are, and what influences have been exerted upon the 
English mind to cause them. 



Periods of English Literatitre, 25 

These queries are partially answered in subse- 
quent chapters, but to discuss them thoroughly 
would demand a careful study of English history, 
and an examination of the history, literature, and 
geographical relations of the neighboring countries. 
It would demand also an inquiry into the manners, 
morals, and customs of them all. 

Our Literature lies before us in two great pe- 
riods. 

I. Immature English^ beginning with an indefi- 
nite date in the remote past, and ending about the 
middle of the sixteenth century. It may be said to 
end with the accession of Queen Elizabeth, in the 
year 1558. 

II. Mature English^ or the period from the year 
1558 to the present time. 

Any classification of the history of our language 
and literature into periods is subject to adverse 
criticism, for it is not true that at any defined date 
one form of style or expression was dropped and 
another assumed, but it is sufficient to say, with 
regard to the above division, that while the school- 
boy of to-day is able to read with ease and pleasure 
all that has been written since the days of Eliza- 
beth, most of what comes to us from an earlier date 
is only understood with the help of a glossary, or 
after special study. The language of the writers 
since 1558 is substantially our own, and is properly 
called modern, though as will be shown it has 
passed through various stages of growth. So also, 



26 Languages of Europe, 



previous to the reign of Elizabeth the immature 
English experienced changes. These latter will be 
understood if we consider that period in four divis- 
ions. 

I. Original English, ending with the year 1150. 
This is sometimes spoken of as the Saxon or Anglo- 
Saxon period, as if one language then used had 
been subsequently changed for another j but, as has 
been shown by the highest authorities, the changes 
have been very gradual, and as our tongue has al- 
ways been called English, it is better for us to use 
the above name. The period is sometimes called 
that of Stability, as the language remained in ma- 
terial points unchanged. 

II. Broke?t English, from 1150 to 1250, during 
which period contact with languages of different 
origin, broke up the original form of the English. 
It is sometimes called the Semi-Saxon, Very Early 
Efiglish, or period of Disintegration. 

III. Dead English, from 1250 to 1350. During 
this century there was very little change in the lan- 
guage. The Latin was used in our literature, and 
the vernacular, though still the speech of the peo- 
ple, was disparaged and little used in literature. 
No distinct tendency was visible, and it has been 
called the period of Stagnatio7i, or simply of Old 
English. 

IV. Reviving Efiglish, extends from 1350 to 1558, 
and is sometimes called the period of Resurrection, 
or Middle English. During all this time the Ian- 



Periods of English Literature. 27 

guage was receiving rich materials from various 
sources, and was becoming so free and flowing, so 
harmonious and forcible as to be fit to convey the 
noble conceptions of Shakespeare and Milton to 
our minds and hearts. This was the era of Chau- 
cer, who encouraged his countrymen to leave Latin 
to the learned, French to the French, and to show 
their own fancies in the speech of their mothers. 
Under such influences the language entered upon 
a new existence, was the speech of all England, and 
was honored. 

We have now reached the end of the period of 
Immaturity. We have said that since 1558 the 
language and literature have been subjected to in- 
fluences that have left permanent marks upon them. 
These differ from those we have just considered in 
that they affect the literature more than they do the 
language. 

Four principal influences have been manifest in 
English Literature during its period of maturity. 

I. The Italian Influence., extending from the ac- 
cession of Queen Elizabeth in 1558, to the execu- 
tion of Charles I., in 1649. Leo X. was then 
Pope, and the great Italian patron of letters, and 
the influence of the learned men whom he encour- 
aged was exerted upon all the literatures of Europe. 
We shall see that it modified that of our language. 

II. The Puritan Influence^ nominally covering 
only the eleven years between 1649 1660, dur- 
ing which the Puritans were in the ascendant. It 



28 Languages of Europe, 



really was exerted, however, both before and after 
that period, and writers who sympathized with the 
Puritans to a greater or lesser extent produced 
works that are still admired, and some which have 
not since been excelled. 

III. The French Influence is apparent from 1660 
to 1700. It was occasioned by the overthrow of 
the Puritan rule and the return of Charles II. from 
France, where he had resided in the luxurious and 
gay court of Louis XIV., for a number of years. 

IV. The People^ s Influence may be said to have 
begun with the year 1700, and to have continued 
to the present time. It was inaugurated by Daniel 
De Foe, the author of Robinson Crusoe^ and the 
founder of the English novel. During this period 
the popular taste has varied considerably, and four 
subdivisions will render these variations more clear. 

A. The Age of Pope, from 1700 to 1745, may be 
said to have been marked by efforts after elegance 
and polish, as the highest qualities of good style. 

B. The Age of Johnson, from 1745 to 1800, was 
characterized by a predominance of the strength, 
depth, and earnestness which the eminence of 
Johnson caused others to imitate, 

C. The Age of Poetical Romance, from 1800 to 
1830. A remarkable number of poets crowd the 
annals of this period. German influence is appar- 
ent, and the writings of the period are marked by 
taste, emotion, and romance. 

D. The Age of Prose Romance, in which we no- 



Periods of English Literature, 29 

tice the culmination of the people's influence, dates 
from the accession of William IV. in 1830, and still 
continues. Sir Walter Scott's influence through 
his Waverley Novels^ more than that of any other 
single author, caused the ascendency of prose over 
poetry. Notwithstanding that prose romance has 
been more to the popular taste than other styles 
of composition, it has not been the only kind cul- 
tivated, and as we consider the vast and erudite 
works of Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude, Prescott, Mot- 
ley, and others, the suspicion is forced upon us that 
we are approaching an era when historical writings 
shall predominate. 





CHAPTER IV. 

PERIOD OF IMMATURITY. 

Original English, Previous to 1150. 

AVING in the previous chapters defined 
the terms necessary to be used, and hav- 
ing shown the divisions under which our 
subject may be viewed, we shall now proceed to 
consider each period somewhat more in detail, 
with some reference to the writers we find in them. 

We have observed that this, the earliest stage of 
the history of our language, is sometimes called 
the Anglo-Saxon period, but as the writers of the 
time never so called it, we use the term. English^ 
and treat the language as our own tongue, though 
in its cradle, which in reality it was. 

" Not a single drop of foreign blood," says Max 
Miiller,^ "has entered into the organic system of 
the English language. The grammar, the blood, 
the soul of the language, is as pure and unmixed 
in English as spoken in the British Isles, as it was 
when spoken on the German Ocean by the Angles, 
Saxons, and Jutes of the continent." Others might 
be cited to the same effect, but after hearing the 
^ Vol. i. p. 81. Scribner's Edition. 



roco . 

00 ^1— I 



o :i • 

) "^2 ^ -73 'CM 



1= 



2:^ 



< 



• ij (u>>o 6^ 
S i^j'? S-S g:^ gi^^^ c 



O O 3J O c 



lis 

rt }-. C 



bJC 6 
w O 



53u 



- 7 ^ c M G 



<U w w 



in o I 



. it ^ 

rt CO O 



^3 ^ 53 



> 5= S 

e 3 <^ 



^^3 



Original English, 31 



highest authority it does noj appear to be neces- 
sary. 

The English mind was active at a very early 
period, but the fruits of its study were for ages re- 
corded to a great extent in the Latin language, be- 
cause that was considered permanent. Latin was 
also the channel of the learning of early times, the 
language of the Church, and readers on the conti- 
nent, who were the principal readers of the day, 
were unacquainted with English. Much, therefore, 
that tended to form the English language, litera- 
ture, and character was expressed in Latin. 

This circumstance retarded the development of 
our literature, and it did not reach its highest stage 
in this period until the reign of Alfred the Great, 
who was born in 841 and died in 901, 

In all literatures the first expression is found in 
rude poetry, because song is the speech of feeling, 
and emotion seeks utterance before men are edu- 
cated to the exercise of logic in reasoning. Hence, 
in the pagan days of England, as in early periods 
in other countries, we find a class of persons called 
Gleemen or Bards, whose business it was to recite 
or sing their poems. The history of the British 
bard is interesting, because from the labors of 
those in his humble calling much has arisen to in- 
fluence the nation. The trouveurs or troubadours 
of France, the scalds of the Scandinavians, and the 
rhapsodists of the Greeks, belonged to the same 
general class. The minnesingers of Germany, who 



32 



Immature English* 



did not arise until several hundred years later, are 
not to be confounded with the bards, for they dif- 
fered from them in important particulars. 

A late writer gives us a view of one of these 
early publishers of literature. "We enter," he 
says, " one of the great festive halls to join in the 
ale-drinking, and hear the gleeman's song. The 
hall is long and wide, say two hundred feet by 
forty, with a high roof and curved gables. There 
is at each extremity an entrance in the middle of 
the wall protected by a porch, that is continued at 
its farther end to form cellar and pantry. We pass 
into the hall, a spacious nave with narrow side- 
aisles. Pillars, dividing aisles from nave, support 
the central roof. The nave is the great hall itself, 
and down the middle of its floor run the stone 
hearths, upon which blaze great timber fires. At 
the upper end is the raised seat of the chief at a 
cross-bench, where his wife, who fills the cups of 
the guests, and his familiar thanes (noblemen), or 
those whom he distinguishes, sit near him. On 
each side of the long hearth there runs a line of 
tables, at which sit the people who are the chiefs 
^hearth-sharers.' At the lower end, at the space 
corresponding with the dais, is a table for the drink- 
ing-cups. Between the rows of pillars and the 
outer walls, spaces are parted off within the narrow 
aisles for sleeping-benches of the warriors. In 
some of the spaces are the gilded vats of liquor 
into which the pails of the cup-bearers are dipped. 



Original E^iglish, 



33 



If women sleep in the hall, the recesses of the pil- 
lars behind the dais are kept sacred to them, and 
there are in the aisles, if the hall be the chiefs 
dwelling, distinct enclosures for the occupation of 
the family. The sleeping space behind the pillars 
might perhaps be parted from the hall by paneling 
and tapestry. In such a hall the gleeman often 
chanted to his harp, now one adventure, now an- 
other, as the guests or their lord might call for 
this or that favorite incident." ^ 

In such a hall as is thus described, we are to 
picture to ourselves the baron and his retainers 
calling upon the rough man of letters to enliven the 
dull moments of the feast with portions of our earli- 
est English poem, the long collection of alliterative 
lines that contains the romantic tale oi Beowulf , 

The only manuscript of the Beowulf is now pre- 
served in the British Museum, and has been the 
cause of much learned discussion. This copy was 
apparently made about the time of the Norman 
Conquest. It is of British origin, and the original 
must have been produced as far back as the seventh 
or eighth century. The poem is heroic, of more 
than six thousand lines, and though not reliable as 
a source of historical information, is very valuable 
as giving a vivid glimpse of life and customs at the 
period. It is full of naive and quaint conceits, and 
of expressive compound words. Among the latter 
are the following : War-fierce^ mead-house^ folk- 
1 Morley's English Writers^ vol. i. p. 252. 
3 



34 



Immature English, 



steady winter' s-tide^ shore-cliffs^ wave-paths^ weapon- 
hearers^ far-dwellers^ home-defenders^ glee-wood^ hand- 
gripe^ sword-wielders , 

Leaving the tale of Beowulf, which is but one of 
a class of ancient poems of disputed origin, we find 
the name of Ccedmon, on the list of poets in the age 
of Original English. Little is known of the per- 
sonal history of this author. He was a monk, and 
his home was in the monastery of Whitby, at the 
mouth of the river Eske, in the present county of 
York. His poem is of great value in itself, and of 
even greater value as one of the influences exerted 
upon the mind of John Milton. We first hear 
of it in an account written by another monk, cele- 
brated as the Venerable Bede, who wrote a few 
years later. It was first published in 1655, only 
twelve years before the publication of Milton's 
Paradise Lost. Like Milton, this early poet be- 
gins with the fall of the rebel angels, sings of the 
creation of light, of Satan and his host, and their 
place of torment, their consultations, of Adam and 
Eve, paradise, the fall, etc., and continues to para- 
phrase much of the subsequent history of our race, 
as recorded in the Bible. He begins thus : — 

" For us it is very right that we praise with our 
words, love in minds, the Keeper of the Heavens, 
Glory-King of Hosts. He is the source of power, 
the head of all His great creation. Lord Almighty. 
He never had beginning nor was made, nor cometh 
any end to the Eternal Lord ; but His power is 



Original English, 35 



everlasting over heavenly thrones. With high maj- 
esty, faithful and strong, He ruleth the depths of 
the firmament that were set wide and far for the 
children of glory, the guardians of souls.'' 

King Alfred, 841-901. In the person of Alfred 
the Great we have an author of merit, who pos- 
sessed at an early age a love for his country, and a 
strong attachment to its old national poetry. He 
learned the Latin language late in life, for the pur- 
pose of translating writings from it into his vernac- 
ular, and beside his own labors he caused learned 
men, whom he employed, to do the same. By these 
means he provided for- the people a number of 
books in their own speech. Among his works, the 
most important is the translation of Bede's Eccle- 
siastical History. At the time of his death he was 
engaged upon a version of the Psalms. 

Alfric, 1006, Archbishop of Canterbury, 

called the Grammarian, from a Latin Grammar 
that he translated ; was a considerable contributor 
to the literature of the period. He wrote eighty 
Homilies in the language of the common people, 
which are simple expositions of doctrines. 

The Saxon Chronicle, 1154, was the work 

of various hands, and was continued through cen- 
turies. It is the most valuable work of the period, 
for it is history written at the time, and although 



36 



Immature English, 



dry and lifeless, it is not to be despised. Exercis- 
ing no judgment, nor dramatic power, the writers 
record great events and lesser transactions in the 
same style. It is the oldest history of England, 
and gives us almost all the information we have on 
the subject of the social life and institutions of our 
forefathers of that age. 

The consideration of this era leads us to the con- 
clusion that English literature began with a high 
aim, a well-defined idea, and a clear, forcible, and 
simple utterance. These dignified traits still char- 
acterize its best productions, and, notwithstanding 
many adverse influences, they are too deeply im- 
bedded in the national soul ever to be eradicated. 



CHAPTER V. 



PERIOD OF IMMATURITY. 

Broken English ^ 1 150-1250. 

ROM the days of Alfred, English letters 
declined, and when William of Normandy- 
took his seat on the throne in 1066, he- 
made the ignorance of the prelates whom he found 
holding sees an excuse for displacing them, and for- 
giving their benefices to more polished scholars from^ 
over the channel. We have seen that the preach- 
ers of religion were also the promoters of learning, 
and at some periods they were almost alone in the 
work. Ecclesiastical power grew steadily and with 
rapidity after the Conquest. The favorites of Wil- 
liam belonged to that body of learned men known 
as scholastics, who for two centuries, since the days 
of Duns Scotus, had been philosophizing about 
religion. 

Scholasticism endeavored to establish a com- 
plete system of truth by a train of human reasoning, 
and under the fostering care of William and his 
successors, it rose to its greatest influence during 
the period now under discussion. 




38 Immature English. 



While the Norman monarchs fostered foreign 
scholasticism they discouraged the culture of the 
vernacular. This conflict between the speech of 
the conquerors and the conquered resulted very 
naturally in the temporary decay of the English. 
The conflicting languages were of different origin, 
the one Romanic and the other Teutonic, and the 
distinctive form of the latter was broken up, and 
it remained thus disintegrated for nearly two cen- 
turies. 

Dr. Craik calls this change the first great revo- 
lution. It was undoubtedly manifest in the spoken 
language long before it was displayed in the writ- 
ten productions, but at last, even literature was 
affected, and many traits that had previously char- 
acterized it were lost. 

Before this era the language had been highly 
inflected, but now, by colHsion with the Norman 
speech, which was scarcely inflected at all, our 
tongue lost its intricate case endings, its numerous 
verbal inflections, many prefixes and sufl^ixes, and 
its artificial distinctions of gender. Notwithstand- 
ing all this, the change was scarcely perceptible in 
the root words, which really form the basis of the 
language. 

This great revolution is also apparent in the so- 
cial and political diction of the nation. At this 
period Latin was the official language of the clergy, 
Norman-French that of the court and nobility, and 
English the speech of the common people. A new 



Broken English. 



39 



social system was organized, and the old English 
culture went down, as Dr. Craik says, because its 
natural aliment had failed. 

In our last chapter we looked into an ancient 
hall and heard the gleeman's song. Now we find 
that he has left us, and quite a different literary 
character appears on the stage. To realize the 
change we must imagine ourselves standing before 
a group of the conventual buildings of the time. 
We hear the " transient wind whistling through the 
hollows of the vaulted aisle," and then — 

" All is hushed and still as death. 'Tis dreadful ! 
How reverend is the face of this tall pile, 
Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads, 
To bear aloft its arched and ponderous roof, 
By its own weight made steadfast and immovable, 
Looking tranquillity. It strikes an awe 
And terror on my aching sight ; the tombs 
And monumental caves of death look cold, 
And shoot a chillness to my trembling heart." 

By thus revisiting in the imagination a venerable 
monastic building of the year 1200, we may be 
aided in getting a vivid idea of the scene. Let us 
enter that heavy oaken door swinging under the 
round Norman archway. Walking beneath the 
massive arcade which formed the cloister, only hes- 
itating a moment to imagine the hooded monks 
giving their bodies exercise there, we begin to as- 
cend a damp, chill stairway. The beauty of the 
graceful architecture strikes us pleasantly as we 
toil upward. The little loop-holes by which we are 



40 



hnmature English, 



lighted on our way seem to grow smaller and the 
passage narrower as we ascend, but it matters not, 
for we are now admitted to a room with high walls 
and brighter light. 

There is, however, little that is cheerful in the 
scene before us. The literary men we sought are 
seated by the rude desks and tables, or are stoop- 
ing over the great wooden chests that are ranged 
around the room. If we were to examine these 
chests we should find in them heaps of precious 
manuscripts, to which some of the tonsured monks 
are adding new ones, while others are adorning 
those already finished. 

The tools they use are strange to us. Among 
them are pens made of reeds and quills, and pen- 
cils of hair of various shapes and sizes, and pots 
of the most brilliant inks — • purple and red and 
violet, — and of gold and silver sizing. The artists 
are worthy of attention. We find that they belong 
to the extensive, wealthy, and learned order of 
Benedictines. To this order belonged Lanfranc, 
Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the scholastics, 
and its members especially excelled in the care 
with which they copied and preserved the valuable 
manuscripts. The order w^as wealthy, but we see 
no appearance of wealth about them, except in the 
grand and costly architecture of their cheerless 
building. They are dressed in the flowing black 
gowns of the order, and the cowl hanging down 
their backs reveals the bare crowns of their shaven 



Broken English, 



41 



heads, and the circle of hair that fringes them. 
We must not despise them. They have worked 
long and carefully in copying and illustrating their 
old black-letter rolls. Carefully and lovingly they 
have held their implements day after day, and 
with an art never surpassed, have quietly laid on 
colors and designs which for richness and beauty 
command our admiration. 

We may imagine a monk of note sitting in his 
great straight-backed chair of oak, with his reed 
pen or hair pencil in his right hand, and a sharp 
knife in the left. For days and weeks he has 
traced the elegant lines around the great character 
at the head of a chapter, and now we find him rap- 
idly writing the silver letters of one of the Gospels. 
Now he changes his pencil, and we see him pro- 
duce one of the sacred names in burnished gold. 
How reverently it was done ! And now he begins 
a new chapter. The reed is changed again, and 
we find the monk dipping into the bright red ink 
to bring out the title in what, even to-day, the prin- 
ter says is rubricated. 

Thus, letter by letter, point by point, the monks 
of the now ruined monasteries copied out, for pres- 
ervation and transmission to us, a great body of 
learning which no one else cared for at the time, 
and which, had it not been for them, would never 
have come to us. Free from secular cares, they 
transcribed and preserved books that are now 
among the choicest treasures of our museums, and 



42 



Immature English, 



they illuminated them with exquisite miniatures, 
beautiful borderings of flowers, and with other de- 
signs of original and quaint conception. 

Layamon's "Brut," 1200, is a poetical chronicle 
of Britain, of about thirty-two thousand lines, writ- 
ten about the year 1200 by a studious parish priest 
named Layamon. The writer is described as a 
modest and pious man, living in Worcestershire, 
a lover of his native land, and one who enjoyed 
the traditions of its ancient times. In familiar 
conversational language he relates the tales of Mer- 
lin, and King Arthur, of King Lear, and his daugh- 
ters Gornoille, Ragan, and Cordoille, with other 
legends of the early days of Britain. Written for 
the people of a country parish not far from the 
borders of Wales, this work contains, as we should 
naturally expect, few words of French origin, and 
is worthy of study as a specimen of the English of 
this period. 

The Ormulum is a simple poetical version of 
some of the Scripture lessons used in the Church 
service. The author tells us he was a canon reg- 
ular of the Order of St. Augustine, and that he 
composed these Homilies for the spiritual improve- 
ment of his countrymen. Only a fragment of the 
work now remains, but as it contains some ten 
thousand long lines, and as there is good reason to 
believe that near three hundred topics were origi- 



Broken English. 



43 



nally treated, it must have been an immense work. 
The fragment has, however, great vahie, being, as 
is confidently asserted, an autograph of brother 
Ormin, the author. There is an interesting differ- 
ence between the form of the Brut of Layamon, 
and the work we are considering. Layamon uses 
a dialect exhibiting Saxon peculiarities, and brother 
Ormin is distinguished by a Scandinavian charac- 
ter. Ormin duplicates his consonants when they 
follow vowels having any other than the name 
sound. For example he writes for pane, p-a-n ; and 
for pan, p-a-n-n, on a principle which obtains to a 
certain extent to-day, but to which Ormin adheres 
with rigor. This custom gives to the Ormidum 
an exaggerated appearance of antiquity, of which 
the following lines will give some idea. 

Nu, brotherr Wallterr, brotherr min 
{A^ow^ brother Walter, brother mine) 
Affterr the flaeshes kinde ; 
{After the flesh's kind) 
Annd brotherr min i Crisstenndom 
(And brother mine in Christendom) 
Thurrh fulluhht and thurrh trowwthe. 
{Through baptism and through truth, etc.) 

The Ancken Riwle, is a prose composition of 
unknown authorship. Ancren Riwle m^?LXi'^ Anchor- 
esses^ Rule, and it is a treatise on the duties of mo- 
nastic life, addressed to three ladies, who, with their 
servants, composed a religious community in Dor- 
setshire. It contains an unusual infusion of words 



44 



Immature E7zglish, 



derived from the Latin, which is accounted for by 
the fact that it was the work of a learned ecclesias- 
tic, and its subject of a religious nature. The spell- 
ing is uncouth and irregular. 



In the natural and moral worlds night follows 
day, and death marks the end of life. Periods of 
energy and faith are succeeded by ages of doubt and 
sloth. We are now approaching the consideration 
of one of the dark periods in English literature, but 
we must not forget that every night brightens into 
a new day, when the morning sun rises above the 
eastern horizon : nor that it is the hope of man that 
though he die and his body be laid among the clods 
of the valley, he shall live again. 

In contemplating the English mind in the annals 
of a wonderful literature, we notice similar alterna- 
tions of the brilliant and the sombre. We may 
justly expect, in the period just before us, some 
trait pointing to the sun-rising which faith in Eng- 
lish manhood and God's providence bids us expect. 



CHAPTER VI. 



Period of Immaturity. 

Dead English^ 12 50-1 3 50. 

HERE is very little to be said about this 
century. With three languages in England 
there was, strictly speaking, no English lit- 
erature, and in fact no national life. English was not 
a dead language as Greek and Latin are now dead, 
for it was yet used by the common people, and it 
is only as there was no literature produced in the 
vernacular that this is called the period of Dead 
English, 

In fact the literary productions of any kind were 
very few during this period. Lord Macaulay points 
tiie English nation to the days of King John, one 
of the meanest of English kings, who ruled from 
1 199 to 12 16, for the origin of its freedom, pros- 
perity, and glory, just as the husbandman points to 
the seed-time for the origin of the golden harvest 
of autumn. It was a hopeful period, however, for 
we have Scriptural authority for saying, that which 
is sown is not quickened except it die. 

We have remarked the disparagement and disuse 
of the vernacular by the nobles. Before the period 




46 



Immature English, 



under consideration closed, however, England was 
separated from Normandy. The conflicting races 
had become somewhat amalgamated, the interests 
of the different ranks of the people had been 
brought into a common field by the over-estimated 
concessions of the Magna Charta, and the true 
English spirit reasserted itself The language now 
began to be used in literature, as well as in common 
discourse, even by those who had despised it before. 
At the beginning of this period, in 1258, King 
Henry III. issued a proclamation intended for 
general circulation, which must be accepted as a 
specimen of the language that was understood by 
all. It is considered one of the most important 
relics of early English. A few years after our 
period closed, in 1362, King Edward HI. opened 
parliament with a speech in the vernacular, which 
we must consider another concession to the growing 
influence of the yeomen, who made themselves felt 
as a power on the brilliant field of Poictiers, — an 
influence they never afterwards lost. 

Roger Bacon, 12 14-1294, was a Franciscan friar 
whose life was one unbroken course of study in 
science, philosophy, and religion. He was a pro- 
found, original thinker, and he opposed the doc- 
trines of those scholastics, who making human rea- 
son the basis of religion, had become rationalists. 
Placing faith in the Scriptures at the foundation 
of wisdom, and attributing the evils of his time to 



Dead English, 



47 



ignorance of them, he exhorted laymen to read the 
Bible in the original languages with diligence. But 
he was three centuries in advance of his time. The 
world was not ready to accept his doctrine, and for 
twelve of the later years of his life he languished 
in prison. If argument were needed to prove that 
English was dead at this period, it would be enough 
to say that Roger Bacon, the greatest mind of the 
age, has left the record of his wisdom solely in the 
Latin tongue. The mere titles of his works are 
strong hints of the low estimate he placed upon the 
vernacular. His chief works are, Opus Majus^ 
Opus Minus, Opus Tertium, Ferspectiva, De Spec- 
ulis, De Mirahili Potestate Artis et Natiirce, and De 
Retardandis Sertectutis Accidentibus, These refer 
generally to science and art. . 

Robert Grosseteste, 1175-1253, was a friend 
and patron of Roger Bacon. After pursuing his 
studies at Oxford and probably at Paris, he became 
Bishop of Lincoln. His accomplishments were 
great and varied, and he wrote a vast number of 
volumes in Latin. Among them are a book of 
husbandry, sermons, philosophical treatises, com- 
mentaries on Aristotle, and Boethius, and some 
Latin verse. 

Robert Mannyng, of Brunne, the dates of 
whose birth and death are not known, wrote a 
Rhyming Chronicle htt^Qtn 1327 and 1338. It was 



48 



Immature English, 



intended for the learned and unlearned, and, as was 
usual at the period, for reading aloud. Aiming to 
have the commonalty, whom he loved, listen to it 
and be instructed, he wrote in the simplest Saxon- 
English phrase. Among his other works was a Book 
of Morals in rhyme, which was also meant to com- 
bine amusement with instruction. Taking the Ten 
Commandments in order he illustrated each with 
doctrine, anecdote, marvel, and moral tale. He 
then illustrates in a similar style the seven deadly 
sins, — Pride, Anger, Envy, Sloth, Covetousness, 
Gluttony, and Lechery. He also treats other sub- 
jects, and exhibits the manners of his time in a racy 
style. He shows us the baron and the rich man plun- 
dering the poor ; the priest in his lust ; the trader and 
his tricks ; the beauty with her powdered face ; the 
chatterers in the church ; and again and again the 
cries of the suffering poor ring through his verse. 
The list of his subjects brings to mind the solid old 
parish churches, the vaulted cathedrals, and the 
now ruined baronial halls of the period, and crowds 
their vacant chambers with the real life of five cen- 
turies ago ! 

The romances, ballads, and lays of the days of 
Robert of Brunne bring us to the eve of that re- 
vived state of literature which became more and 
more marked as the brilliant reign of Edward III. 
progressed, and of which our next chapter treats. 




CHAPTER VIL 

PERIOD OF IMMATURITY. 

Reviving English^ 135 0-15 58. 

^p^pE come now to consider a very interesting 
^Ww^j period in the history of our literature. 
I^W^ ! Darkness had brooded over the land, and 
thick darkness had covered the people, as we have 
seen ; but now we are to contemplate a new life. 
The nation was coming to maturity. The English 
speech was cultivated more, and why ? We must 
look to history for our answer. 

For years after 1340 the French and English 
were at war. Edward III. was King, and his vic- 
tories and those of his renowned son, the Black 
Prince, stirred the British heart, and deepened the 
love of country. The fact that the victories of 
Sluys, Cressy, Poictiers, and Calais were to a great 
extent the work of the English people rather than of 
the nobles, raised the yeomen in their own esteem. 
This proper patriotism and self-respect, and this 
military activity, begat an increased literary activity, 
and an appreciation of the vernacular, which, so far 
as literature is concerned, had been almost dead for 
a century. 

4 



50 



Immature English, 



The period was one of preparation in every coun- 
try in Europe, a truth which we must keep in view 
as we consider the authors of the time, but which 
will be still more apparent when we reach the next 
chapter. The era begins with the successful wars 
just mentioned. Before it closed printing had been 
invented, the Reformation in Germany had been 
begun by Luther, and the reign of Henry VIII. had 
ended in England. At its beginning Petrarch and 
Boccaccio were living in Italy, and Dante had just 
ceased to sing, while, before it closed, both Ariosto 
and Tasso had begun and terminated their careers. 
This revival of intellectual activity was like life 
from the dead. 

The capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 
1453 caused the dispersion of a number of men of 
letters who had resided there. The de Medicis 
invited these to Italy, and, with their help, laid the 
foundations of schools which projected a powerful 
influence upon the intellectual life of all Europe. 
Dante and Boccaccio and Petrarch exerted a direct- 
ing power, during the period under consideration, 
upon a few English writers, some of whom visited 
Italy, but it was personal and quite limited. It 
had had importance, however, as preparing the way 
for a greater Italian influence to come. 

A word must be said here about the effect which 
translations of the Bible have caused, as exhibited 
in the domain of literature. A distinguished schol- 
ar tells us that the stories of conversion recorded 



Reviving English, 51 



in the Gospels have a liveliness and truth which are 
felt most strongly by those who know and consider 
how perfectly new to literature such sketches were 
when they appeared. " It was by them," he con- 
tinues, " that the depth and complexity and mystery 
of the human heart were first brought to light, and 
their appearance involved a revolution in literature, 
the results of which are to be traced, not so much 
in the long barbaric period which followed their 
diffusion, as in Dante and Shakespeare." The 
effect of Bible story has already been noticed in 
Caedmon, singing of God's mercy to the poor and 
ignorant as he found it there recorded. Again we 
saw its power in the case of King Alfred, causing 
all the Gospels to be translated, and at last dying, 
before his labors to give the Psalms to his loved 
people were complete. The Archbishop of Canter- 
bury used his time and talents in expounding Scrip- 
ture doctrines, and gave also the first seven books 
of the Old Testament to the commonalty. The 
Venerable Bede translated the Gospel of John, and 
in 706 Aldhelm the Psalms, which have always been 
favorites with preacher and people alike. We have 
in imagination visited the cloisters, and have there 
seen the Roman Catholic monk of the thirteenth 
century carefully illuminating costly copies of the 
Gospels, which his companions had written with 
equal scrupulousness, on vellum. In the next cen- 
tury we noticed Robert of Brunne illustrating in 
another way the Ten Commandments, and now we 



52 



Immature E^iglish, 



shall have a view of John Wiclif, the keenest schol- 
ar of his day, dividing his time, in the quiet parish 
of Lutterworth, between visits to the poor, the sick, 
and the dying, and the heavy labor of translating 
the whole Bible, for the first time, into the speech 
of his humblest parishioners. During the period 
before us we shall notice William Tindale printing, 
in Worms in 1525, a version of the New Testament 
translated from the original Greek, a work which he 
says he could not find room to do in England. We 
shall have brought to remembrance, too, good Miles 
Coverdale, and Bishop Cranmer, who both did 
much service as translators of the Bible, and Bishop 
Parker, who, with the help of other scholars, pro- 
duced the ".Bishops' Bible " in 1568, and the Douay 
Bible which was translated from the Latin text 
called the Vulgate, though the tw^o last belong to 
the days of Queen Elizabeth. 

Acting, as would appear, on the advice of Roger 
Bacon, the English people were searching the Scrip- 
tures with a will ; and we must remember that all 
this, work of translation was done by high officials 
or prominent members of the Roman Catholic 
Church. Aside from the religious aspects of this 
matter, which it is not our province to investigate, 
the translations of the Bible exerted a powerful in- 
fluence upon our literature and language. They 
trained the English mind, and gave it strength, free- 
dom, and cultivation, and they tended to fix the 



Reviving English. 



S3 



language, and keep it in the forcible and strong 
state in which it was at the time. 

John Mandeville, i 300-1372, is generally con- 
sidered the first writer of modern English prose. 
A native of Hertfordshire, he was educated for the 
medical profession, and became also proficient in 
natural philosophy and theology. He had no 
sooner completed his studies than he left England, 
and for thirty-four years wandered all over the 
known world. About the year 1356 he returned, 
and wrote in Latin a Narrative of his Travels, which 
he subsequently translated into French, and again 
into English, in order, as he says, " that every man 
of my nacion may undirstonde it." He was a very 
credulous, but not a mendacious author, and though 
he has recorded some of the most extravagantly 
romantic fables, he makes no effort at exaggeration 
when writing from his own observation. His book 
is piquant and was much read, and is a deeply in- 
teresting monument of the thought of the period. 
The author uses a natural style, and incorporates 
more of the Romanic element than any writer of the 
period. 

John Wiclif, 1324-1384, was born in Yorkshire 
in a parish from which he took his name, was 
thoroughly educated, and in 1372 received from 
Oxford the degree of Doctor of Divinity, which 
entitled him to lecture at that University. He lived 



54 



Im^nature English. 



at the period when the mendicant friars swarmed 
all over England, and against their abuses, as well 
as against many other errors of his church, he 
preached with a holy boldness. In 1377 he was 
examined as a heretic by order of Pope Gregory XI. 
in St. Paul's Church. Five papal bulls were issued 
against him, and in 1382 his works were condemned. 
But most of the English laymen were with him at 
first, and at last the humbler priests, taking up his 
words, trudged all over the land preaching his doc- 
trines wherever they could gather an audience, in 
church or out of it, in the market-place or at the 
fair. Silenced at Oxford, and comparatively hidden 
in the rectory of Lutterworth, Wiclif s influence did 
not cease. In his retirement he produced the first 
complete English Bible ; there he wrote his Trialo- 
giis^ or conversations on truth, wisdom, and false- 
hood ; and there he wrote a large number of tracts 
addressed to the people, which were widely read. 
His tracts are in rugged and sometimes slovenly 
language. His translation of the Bible is still 
read with considerable ease. 

"Vision of Piers Plowman,'' 1362. This is 
a work in alliterative verse, written in the strong 
language of the common people, by an unknown 
poet. Like Bunyan, the author dreams, and under 
the guise of allegory not dissimilar to Filgrim^s 
Progress, exhibits the impediments and tempta- 
tions of life. The author's tone, language, and 



Reviving English. 



55 



sentiments, as well as his exhibition of the humor 
and grumbling so natural to the English, made his 
work exceedingly popular among the masses, and 
had probably no small influence in preparing them 
for the teachings of Wiclif It presents pictures of 
social life, describes " Vanity Fair," introduces us 
to the ecclesiastics, exhibits their vices, and does 
all with so much directness and detail, that, not- 
withstanding its great length, it went home to the 
heart of the humblest to whom it was recited. 

Geoffrey Chaucer, 1328-1400, was a brother- 
in-law of John of Gaunt, who was the fourth son of 
Edward III., and the ancestor of the Tudor line 
of English sovereigns. He was well educated in 
English, French, Latin, and Italian, but where and 
how long he studied is not known, though on slight 
evidence, it is asserted that he was a member of 
both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and 
studied law at the Inner Temple Court. He was 
a favorite at the court of Edward III., and had 
other advantages from his high connections, but 
owing to the changes of the times, he was subject 
to reverses, once w^as imprisoned in the Tower, and 
on another occasion was obliged to flee to the con- 
tinent for safety. Having travelled much on the 
continent, he was familiar with foreign customs and 
style in writing, but being a hearty Englishman, he 
only engrafted these on his own stock as the actual 
wants of our speech demanded. His it was to 



56 



Immature English, 



combine the Romanic and Teutonic elements, and 
he did it with wonderful tact and sound taste. 
He was familiar with ancient as well as modern 
literature, with the fashionable polemic and theo- 
logical topics of his own day, and was a thorough 
student of human nature. In religious matters he 
was much influenced by Wiclif, whose doctrines he 
promoted. After a life of varied experience he died 
in London, and was the first of the poets buried in 
Westminster Abbey. His reputation rests mainly 
on his Canterbury Tales, a series of humorous 
and pathetic stories related by a company of per- 
sons who are represented to have set out from the 
Tabard Inn, London, on a pilgrimage to the tomb 
of Thomas k Becket, at Canterbury. If the concep- 
tion be not original, the details of this work un- 
doubtedly are, for in the description of each of the 
company, and in the minute account of the inci- 
dents of the journey, we plainly see the hand of a 
master. He* brings before us the nun with her 
beads and neat dress, her gray eyes, small mouth, 
red lips, her well-proportioned nose, and describes 
her moral qualities and stately manners. Then 
we see the mendicant friar, wanton and merry, the 
miller drunken with ale, the clerk of Oxford, the 
reve, or bailiff, the knight from the wars of the 
Crusades, the merchant with forked beard, the frank- 
lin, or free-man, with ruddy face and white beard, 
the haberdasher, carpenter, weaver, and dyer, the 
sailor, the wife of Bath, the humble and pious par- 



Reviving English* 



57 



son, the ploughman, who loved God with all his 
heart, and his neighbor as himself, and the pardoner 
with smooth yellow flaxen hair hanging over his 
shoulders, who had come straight from Rome. 
Each of the pilgrims was to relate two stories going 
to Canterbury, and two returning, but the poet did 
not live to complete his design, and only twenty- 
four tales are included in the work. Among Chau- 
cer's other poetical works, are The Court of Love, 
Troilus and Cressida, The Romance of the Rose, 
The Legefid of Good Women^ and the Flower and 
the Leaf They were written with so excellent a 
choice of words, and in so spirited a manner, that 
they took a firm hold on the affections of the peo- 
ple, and are capable of charming their readers yet. 
Chaucer wrote some prose, but his fame rests upon 
his poetry. 

John Gower, 1320-1408, a friend of Chaucer, is 
a poet of whose personal history we know very little. 
He wrote in English, French, and Latin, and lacked 
his friend's sympathy with the people and admira- 
tion of the vernacular. Gower's reputation as an 
English poet rests upon his Confessio Amantis, 
in which a lover is represented seeking absolution 
of his confessor. Genius, who refuses to grant it 
until he has probed the lover to the quick and ex- 
posed his weak points. This is carried to the verge 
of dullness and prosiness, but the moral tone of the 
work is so elevated that Chaucer called his friend 



58 



Immature English, 



the Moral Gower, a sobriquet which will probably 
always adhere to him. 

Bishop Pecocke, 1390-1460, was a theological 
writer who opposed the doctrines of Wiclif and the 
Lollards, but as he admitted that General Councils 
are fallible, he was not approved by his own party, 
and was condemned to burn fourteen of his own 
books at St. Paul's Cross, London, and was after- 
wards imprisoned. His chief English work is en- 
titled The Repressor of the too much blaming of the 
Clergy^ in which, besides the doctrine above, he 
upholds the Bible as the true rule of faith. His 
style is popular, lively, clear, and precise. 

Sir Thomas Malory, was a knight of whom we 
know nothing, but that he wrote the famous his- 
tory of King Arthur, commonly called the Morte 
d' Arthur, about the year 1470. He says he com- 
piled it " oute of certeyn bookes of Frensshe, and 
reduced it into Englysshe.'' It was printed by 
Caxton in 1485 with the title of The Byrth, Lyfe^ 
and Actes of King Arthur ; of His Noble Knyghtes 
of the Roufide Table, etc. Though Malory says he 
compiled this famous work, the English is virtually 
his own, and as Dr. Craik says, " he shows consider- 
able mastery of expression, his English is always 
animated and flowing, and in its earnestness and 
tenderness, occasionally rises to no common beauty 
and tenderness." The origin of the Round Table 



Reviving English. 59 



romances is involved in impenetrable obscurity. The 
series comprises six distinct narratives, the first of 
which is that of the Sangreal or Holy Grail, which 
as the holy vessel used by our Saviour at the Last 
Supper, was, after the crucifixion, preserved by 
Joseph of Arimathea, and, after many marvelous 
adventures, brought into Britain. This was prob- 
ably founded on some religious legend brought 
from the East by returning crusaders. The second 
story is that of the enchanter Aferlin, in which we 
are introduced to some of the knights of the Round 
Table, and are made acquainted with the events of 
Arthur's reign. The third tale relates the adven- 
tures of Lancelot dii Lac. The fourth is the Queste 
dii St. Greal, or the search of the Sangreal, in 
which the prominent figures are Percival, Gawaine, 
Lancelot, and Galahad, who is finally successful. 
The next story is the Morte cT Arthur, in which 
we are told of the war which led to Arthur's death. 
The sixth story, of Tristan, called also Tristram and 
Iseult, appears to be of a later date. These ro- 
mances are assigned to the sixth century, and were 
partially recorded before the days of Malory. Since 
his day they have been favorite themes with roman- 
cers and poets, as we shall have occasion to see. 
They have exerted a powerful influence on English 
literature, and are the subject of the very latest of 
the poems of Tennyson, the poet laureate of Eng- 
land, published in 1870. 



6o 



Immatiwe English, 



Sir Thomas More, 1480-1535, a friend of the 
learned and sarcastic Erasmus, once a professor 
of Greek at Cambridge, was of noble birth, who 
after studying at Oxford and elsewhere, entered 
Parliament at about twenty-one years of age. He 
became conspicuous as a member of Parliament, 
and under Henry VI H. enjoyed much favor, rising 
from one degree to another until he finally took the 
seat on the Chancellor's bench made vacant by the 
fall of his enemy Cardinal Wolsey. In this high 
post he was remarkable for his uprightness. HLs 
happy home ^ was at Chelsea, now one of the sub- 
urbs of London, where, with his loved wife Alice, 
he used to entertain not only his learned Dutch 
friend Erasmus, but also clumsy King Henry, and 
many brilliant literary men of the day. The pleas- 
ant days did not last, however, and More's head 
fell under the headsman's axe, by order of Hen- 
ry, because the Chancellor would not pronounce 
the king's marriage with Anne Bullen legal. His 
principal work in English was a Life of Richard 
IIL, of which Hallam says, it " appears to me the 
first example of good English language ; pure and 
perspicacious, well chosen, without vulgarisms or 
pedantry." More also wrote a Latin work enti^ 
tied Utopia^ which word he constructed from the 
Greek to mean nowhere. It is an original romance, 
in which he describes a happy island discovered 
by a supposed companion of Amerigo Vespucci. 
The writer describes an imaginary and impossible 



Revivi7tg E7tglish. - 6 1 

state of society, and is enabled to hit at follies with 
elegant sarcasm. It is the first of a style of writing 
in which More had distinguished successors, among 
whom Dean Swift deserves special mention. 

John Skelton, 1460-1529, was a graduate of 
Cambridge, and became a tutor of the Duke of 
York, afterwards Henry VIII. In 1498 he took 
holy orders, for which he was not fit, and he was 
suspended by the Bishop of Norwich. He wrote 
vigorous, sarcastic, doggerel rhyme, not lacking 
in poetical vigor, in which he cudgeled the clergy 
unmercifully. Erasmus gave him considerable 
praise for scholarship, calling him the light and 
ornament of English letters. His chief works are, 
Bouge of Court ^ or Court Diet ; the Book of Philip 
Sparrow^ which is an elegy on a sparrow slain by 
a cat in a nunner)^ at Norwich, and is comic, im- 
aginative, and original ; and Why come ye not to 
Court a satire of 1300 lines, aimed at Cardinal 
Wolsey. 

Hugh Latimer, 1472-1555, a famous leader of 
the Reformation, was born in a Leicestershire farm- 
house, was educated at Cambridge, and was one of 
the earliest English students of Greek. He was in 
early life a prominent Romanist, but becoming a 
zealous Protestant, he was burned by Queen Mary, 
by the side of John Ridley, at Oxford in 1555. His 
chief productions were sermons, which are fine 



62 



Immature English, 



specimens of homely, unaffected, plain English 
prose, and have many droll illustrations drawn from 
local events, and his own experience. He addressed 
the common people, and his sermons well illustrate 
the manners of his time and the inner life and 
thoughts of his hearers. 

Thomas Cranmer, 1489-15 5 6, like Latimer,, 
was educated at Cambridge. He holds the high- 
est rank as a writer among the Reformers, and 
was influential in establishing the present polity of 
the Church of England. His great fault was a 
want of adherence to principle, though at the last 
he was faithful, and was burned at the stake by 
Mary. He compiled the Book of Common Frayer 
used now in England, and with slight changes, 
in America. He superintended a revised transla- 
tion of the Scriptures, called the "Great Bible," 
or Cranmer's Bible. He also published Twelve 
Homilies, 

Sir John Cheke, 15 14-1557, was the first royal 
professor of Greek at Cambridge, and by his ef- 
forts to foster the study of that elegant language, 
improved the purity and tone of English prose, in 
which he was a writer of meritorious style. His 
only original English w^ork is the Hurt of Sedi- 
tion^ how grievous it is to a Commo7iwealth, He 
wrote learned works in Latin. His writings are 
grave in style, and he avoided alliteration, and 
other vices that had become prevalent in literature. 



Reviving English, 



63 



Nicholas Udall, 15 06- 15 64, a Lutheran of 
some education, head-master at Eton School, where 
he was noted for cruel floggings, was the writer of 
the first English comedy. It is entitled Ralph 
Royster £>oyster, and in it we have a lively pic- 
ture of London life among the gallants and citi- 
zens of the middle class. It possesses a comic 
spirit and humor without descending to licentious- 
ness or buffoonery, and belongs to a class of writ- 
ings in which the English nation stands foremost. 

Roger Ascham, i 5 15--15 68, was the learned 
teacher of Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey. He 
was the son of a Yorkshire yeoman, a graduate of 
Cambridge, and a distinguished Greek scholar. 
His chief works are Toxophilus and the School- 
master^ which are written in easy conversational 
prose. In the first the English were taught a les- 
son in manly sports which they have never forgot- 
ten ; and in the latter he gave them their first work 
on education. They are polished, classical, learned, 
and intelligible now. It is pleasant to look back 
at this old schoolmaster, reading Latin and Greek 
with his girlish pupil, the Princess Elizabeth, in 
1548; and then, a score of years after, when the 
princess had become queen, to find her still read- 
ing the classics with the old man, or playing tables 
or shovel-board with him. When he died Queen 
Elizabeth exclaimed, " I would rather have thrown 
ten thousand pounds into the sea than have lost 
my Ascham ! 



64 Immature English, 



Miles Coverdale, 1487-1568, another York- 
shireman, was Bishop of Exeter, and brings us again 
to the translations of the Bible. Having labored 
for years, he published a translation in 1535, was 
engaged upon Cranmer's Bible, and, having been 
exiled, fled to Geneva, where he helped to produce 
the Geneva Bible, 

John Knox, 1505-1572, the son of a Scottish 
yeoman, was educated at the University of Glas- 
gow, where he took priest's orders. The study of 
Jerome and Augustine shook his religious opinions, 
however, and in 1542 he became an avowed and 
bold reformer. He suffered much persecution, and 
was an exile in Switzerland for a time, but his 
boldness was not lessened, and returning to Scot- 
land, he inaugurated a movement which led to the 
establishment of Presbyterianism in that country. 
His style is strong, and marked by a want of gen- 
iality. He wrote a History of the Reformation in 
Scotland^ a pamphlet entitled the First Blast of the 
Tru7npet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, 
Expositions of the Scriptures, and various tracts. 
By "Regiment of Women," he meant government 
of women. It was the time of Mary Stuart in 
Scotland, Mary Tudor in England, and when those 
nearest the succession were, in each instance, wo- 
men. 

The period just concluded was to a remarkable 
extent an era of beginnings. 



Reviving English. 65 



We considered first Sir John Mandeville, one of 
the greatest of early English travellers, who is gen- 
erally styled the first writer of modern English 
prose. Then, leaving the gay traveller, we saw 
good old John Wiclif, working in his parsonage at 
his translation of the Bible^ and standing forth as 
the bright Morning Star of the English Reforma- 
tion. Next, the author of Piers Plowman gave the 
English the foundation for future allegories. 

Geoffrey Chaucer, surrounded by the creations 
of his fancy, so real as to appear like living men 
and women, begins the long line of our modern 
English poets. From the mists of the ages now 
Sir Thomas Malory just emerges, to hand us his 
carefully treasured book, — the first connected ac- 
count of King Arthur and his knights. He no 
sooner appears than he is gone, and in his place 
Sir Thomas More comes forward, dressed in his 
Chancellor's robes. He leaves us a volume telling 
of a land that is nowhere, a land of ideal loveliness 
and of bliss the world shall never see. Now," he 
says, "you may look for Utopias ; and your authors 
will henceforth know how to write satirical ro- 
mance." 

We saw Cranmer perish at the stake, but it was 
not until he had given England her Prayer Book, 
and her Church Polity. And now Nicholas Udall 
crowds himself upon our view, and with mock 
gravity lays before us Ralph Royster JDoyster, and 
we recognize the first English comedy. The pa- 
5 



66 



Immature English. 



triarch advancing now is Roger Ascham, holding in 
his still sinewy grasp the first treatise on education, 
and his argument for manly sports. 

Before the curtain drops we find ourselves walk- 
ing down the High Street of Edinburgh. Just as 
we pass the Heart of Mid-lothian we encounter a 
crowd, and, looking upward, see a venerable form 
at a little pulpit-like window that juts over the 
pavement. The appearance of the crowd, and the 
words we now and then catch, tell us the old man is 
preaching. Listening again we hear the Monstrous 
Regiment of Women denounced, and then we re- 
member that it was John Knox who first gave Pres- 
byterianism to Scotland ! 



mature: 

This Chart exhibits the Progress of English Literature — its periods in Et> 

some of the Contemporary Events, as wel. 



A. D. 1500 Tudors. 1558 
Henry VII,, 1509. 
Henry VIII., 1547. 
Edward VI., 1553 
Mary, 1558. 



Stuarts. 



1660 



James I., 1625. ^ 
Charles L, 1649. 

Commonwealth, 1649-1660. 
Elizabeth, 1603. Charles II., 1685. 

James II., 16: 

1558 1649 1660 



English Literature 
in England. 



Italian Influence. 



Puritan Influence. 



French \ 



English Literature in America. 



Colonial Period. 



Sir Philip Sidney. 
Christopher Marlowe. 
Edmund Spenser. 
Richard Hooker. 
John Lyly. 
William Shakespeare. 
King James's Bible. 
Francis Bacon. 
Beaumont and Fletcher. 
Michael Drayton. 
John Donne. 
George Herbert. 
Ben Jonson. 
John Ford. 
John Selden. 



Francis Quarles. 
William Browne. 
Wm. Drummond. 
Thomas Fuller. 
Abraham Cowley. 
Jeremy Taylor. 
George Wither. 
Sir Wm. Davenant. 
John Milton. 
Edmund Waller. 
Ralph Cudworth. 
John Bunyan. 
Richard Baxter. 



Samuel B; !r, 
Thomas C ay. 
Sir G. Etl! c 
John Dry 
Samuel Pil % 
John Loci; 
J. Evelvnl 
William' \j:ki 
G. Burnet 
R. South. 
J. Addisoi 
John Var: , 
Isaac Nev 1, 
Richard S le. 
William Cs grc 



1492. America Discovered 

1513. Pope Leo, X. 
1517. Luther's Reformation. 
Machiavelli, d. 1527. 
Ariosto, d. 1533. 

1534. Henry VIII., Head of the Church. 
1538. Monasteries suppressed. 
Prayer-Book, 1549. 
Tasso, d. 1559. 

1559-60. Scotch Reformation under Knox 

Hans Sachs, d. 1568. 

1572. St. Bartholomew. 

1588. Spanish Armada. 

Montaigne, d. 1592. 

Oliver Cromwell, 1599. 



1605. Gunpowder Plot. 
Virginia settled, 1607. 
Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648. 
1620. Pilgrims landed. 
Salem settled, 1628. 
Boston settled, 1630. 
Hartford settled, 1636. 
Galileo, d. 1642. 

1643. England and Scotland united. 
Battle of Naseby, 1645. 
Pascal, d. 1662. 

New York taken from the Dutch, 1664. 

Great Plague, London, 1665. 

Great Fire, London, 1666. 

Moliere, d. 1673. 

Habeas Corpus Act, 1679. 

Corneille, d. 1684. 

Racine, d. 1699. 



NGLISH. 

id and America — the Authors mentioned in Gihnan's First Steps — and 
U some of the German and French zvriters. 



1700 
t\^t and Nassau. 
y II., 1694. 
William III., 1702. 
Anne, 1714. 

1700 



1745 Brunswick. i8oo 
George I., 1727. 

George II., 1760. 

George III., 1820. 

George IV., 1830. 



1830 1870 
William IV., 1837. 
Victoria. 



1745 



1800 



1830 



1870 



Iilence. Age of Pope. Age of Johnson. Poetical Romance. Prose Romance. 



775. Revolutionary Period. 1830. American Period. 



4. 



V tierly. 



Daniel Defoe. 
John Gay. 
Alexander Pope. 
Jonathan Swift. 
J. Thomson. 
Isaac Watts. 
Bolingbroke. 
Bishop Berkeley. 
Henry Fielding. 
William Collins. 
Samuel Richardson. 
Allan Ramsay. 
Lady Montague. 
Laurence Sterne. 
Tobias G. Smollett. 



Jonathan Edwards. 
T. Gray. 

Oliver Goldsmith. 
David Hume. 
Samuel Johnson. 
Benjamin Franklin. 
Adam Smith. 
William Robertson. 
Edw. Gibbon. 
Robert Bums. 
Edmund Burke. 
William Cowper. 
Timothy Dwight. 



Thomas Percy. 
P. B. Shelley. 
Lord Byron. 
George Crabbe. 
Jeremy Bentham. 
Sir Walter Scott. 
S. T. Coleridge. 
Charles Lamb. 
Thomas Arnold. 
Robert Southey. 
Thomas Campbell. 
Thomas Hood. 
Sydney Smith. 
Edgar A. Poe. 



W. S. Landor. 
Henry Hallam. 
Lord Brougham. 
Washington Irving. 
Leigh Hunt. 
Thomas De Quincey. 
Richard Whateley. 
Sir Wm. Hamilton. 
J. F. Cooper. 
John Keble. 
W. C. Bryant. 
Thomas Carlyle. 
Francis Wayland. 
Mark Hopkins. 



William Wordsworth. R. W. Emerson. 



Daniel Webster. 
Thomas Moore. 
Samuel Rogers. 



ossuet, d. 1704. 

ousseau, 171 2-1 788. 

oileau, d 1711. 

e'nelon, d. 1715. 

lopstock, 1 724-1803. 

ant, 1724-1804. 

essing, 1 729-1 781. 

^ieland, 1733-18 13. 

eorgia settled, 1732. 

oethe, 1 749-1832. 

:hiller, 1 759-1 805. 

atherine II. of Russia, 1 762-1 796. 

;amp Act, 1765. 

76. Declaration of Independence. 
Dmwallis surrenders, 1782. 
oltaire, d. 1778. 

'89. President Washington Inaugurated, 
lirger, d. 1794. 



Hohenlinden, 1800. 



Jacobi, d. 
Waterloo, 
Missouri 



1819. 
1815. 

Compromise, 



Frederick Schlegel, d. 
1829. 

1830. Louis Philippe. 
1830. George IV., d. 
1830. Railways first 

opened. 
Niebuhr, d. 183 1. 
Aug. Schlegel, 1845. 
1846. Mexican War. 
1848. French Republic. _ 

1848. Hungarian Rebellion. 
Louis Philippe abdicates, 1848. 

1849. Pope flies from Rome. 
1852. Napoleon III. 
Heine, d. 1856. 

Alex. Von Humboldt, d. 1859. 



Nath'l Hawthorne. 
Lord Lytton. 
H. W. Longfellow 
J. G. Whittier. 
Mrs. Browning. 
O. W. Holmes. 
Alfred Tennyson. 
W. M. Thackeray. 
Charles Dickens. 
Robert Browning. 
Mrs. St owe. 
John Ruskin. 
J. Lothrop Motley. 
James A. Froude. 
J. R. Lowell. 
M. Arnold. 
G. W. Curtis.^ 
William Morris. 



I 



CHAPTER VIIL 




MATURE ENGLISH. 

The Italian Infl uence^ 1 5 5 8- 1 649 . 

i]HE period before us is often called the Age 
of Elizabeth^ and the Golden Age, either of 
which terms is appropriate. It includes, 
however, not only the reign of England's greatest 
queen, but also those of her successors, James I. 
who died in 1625, and Charles I. who was beheaded 
in 1649. The first half of Elizabeth's reign is not 
marked by the production of works that should 
give the period the high distinction it has received. 

At the beginning of the era just concluded there 
had been a notable increase of literary life, but the 
activity did not continue throughout the period. 
The fifty years before the accession of Elizabeth 
were crowded with exciting changes. 

Henry VHI. began to reign in 1509, at the age 
of eighteen. He was a monarch of caprices, which 
w^ere exhibited in other relations as well as in his 
dealings with his wives. At the time of his acces- 
sion, Thomas Wolsey was Dean of Lincoln, having 
previously been one of the chaplains of Henry VII., 



68 



Mature Efiglish, 



and to him, for various reasons, the young king 
looked for advice. Wolsey cultivated his esteem 
and obtained many preferments, but differing with 
him on the subject of Queen Catherine's divorce, 
Henry charged his favorite with high treason. 
AVolsey was disgraced, and would have been exe- 
cuted, had he not died at Leicester Abbey, to which 
place he had fled for refuge. Sir Thomas More 
took Wolsey's place, but was subsequently beheaded, 
a martyr to the royal caprice. Thomas Cranmer, 
the third favorite, outlived his royal master, but it 
was only to perish at the hands of his daughter 
Mary. 

Among the other events were Henry's defiance 
of the Pope of Rome, his wars with France, the 
demolition of the monasteries and convents, terrible 
persecutions of papists, hangings, burnings, and be- 
headings, and such violations of the liberties guaran- 
teed by the Magna Charta as no English sovereign 
was ever before guilty of The people were in 
terror. 

The short reign of Edward VI. was a season of 
comparative quiet ; but when his sister Mary came 
to the throne there was a great change. Inaugurat- 
ing her accession by the execution of Lady Jane 
Grey, she made herself increasingly odious by en- 
deavoring to force Roman Catholicism upon the 
nation. During the five years of her reign near 
three hundred so-called heretics perished at the 
stake. 



Italian Influence, 



69 



Notwithstanding the delirium of joy with which 
Elizabeth's accession, or rather the death of Mary, 
was received, the early years of her reign were by 
no means undisturbed. The painful circumstances 
connected with the imprisonment of Mary Stuart, 
ending with her execution in 1587, the executions 
caused by the enforcement of the act of Supremacy, 
and the loss of t\vo thousand clergymen who left 
the Church of England because they could not, in 
conscience, submit to the act of Uniformity, — these 
affairs so engrossed public attention that small in- 
terest was manifested in letters. 

By degrees, however, quiet was restored, and 
men began to breathe more freely. There was 
universal progress, new knowledge w^as eagerly re- 
ceived, and literary topics assumed greater impor- 
tance. 

Nor was this activity apparent only in England. 
In his Polish observatory Copernicus had already 
concluded the observations which led to the pub- 
lication in 1543 of his great wwk,"On the Revolu- 
tion of the Heavenly Bodies." Cortez had just 
before conquered the rich kingdom of Mexico for 
his sovereign Charles V., and it was the era of the 
formation of the Dutch Republic, as well as of the 
revolt of the Moors in Spain. It was the period of 
the Spanish Armada, of the voyages of Sir Francis 
Drake, of the increase of England's naval powder, 
of the introduction of tobacco and of potatoes, of 
the great reformation of Luther in Germany, of the 



;o 



Mature English, 



Council of Trent, and of the revival of arts, sciences, 
and literature throughout Europe. 

New worlds, new peoples, new wealth, everything 
appeared new, or in a new phase, and there arose 
that galaxy of lights in the literary firmament which 
pale the rays, as well of those who went before, as 
of all who have since risen. 

Another influence contributed also to mark the 
line between immaturity and maturity, than which 
no other was more potent. This was the printer's 
press, which had been introduced in the fifteenth 
centur}^, and was now showing its fruits in a more 
fixed language. Before this time every writer wrote 
and spelled too much as he pleased, without rule, 
and not even observing uniformity in different parts 
of the same work. Now, when one man published 
many books, the need of uniformity was more ap- 
parent, and since he circulated many copies his ex- 
ample became a guide to others, and the form as 
well as the style of our language grew more fixed. 

Sir Philip Sidney, 1554-1586, whom Queen 
Elizabeth called the jewel of her dominions, was of 
illustrious family, being a nephew of Robert Dudley, 
Earl of Leicester. After receiving a careful educa- 
tion at Oxford and Cambridge, he entered public 
life, and became the pet of the people as well as the 
pride of the queen. He died at the age of thirty- 
two from the effect of a wound received in a battle 
fought to aid the Protestants of the Netherlands, 



Italian Influence, 



71 



against the Spanish Romanists. Sidney wrote little 
or nothing for publication, and yet, by his posthu- 
mous works, exerted a powerful influence upon the 
intellectual spirit of his age, and ranks among the 
best writers of the time. His fame rests principally 
upon The Arcadia^ a heroic romance, written at 
Wilton, the seat of his sister, the Countess of Pem- 
broke j and the Defence of Poesie, which is one 
of the earliest pieces of English criticism. In the 
latter work the author, who was sensible of the 
genius often concealed in rude legends and ancient 
ballads, shows the advantages of the cultivation of 
imaginative literature, which the growing Puritan- 
ism of the age was disparaging. 

Christopher Marlowe, 1563-1593, the great- 
est dramatist before Shakespeare, was the son of 
a shoemaker. After his graduation at Cambridge, 
he wrote Tambourlaine the Great^ Dr. Faustus, 
the yew of Malta, and Edward IL, which are 
full of dramatic incidents and poetic beauty, though 
they are criticized as in parts bombastic, extrava- 
gant, and sometimes licentious. Marlowe died at 
the age of thirty, being killed in a disreputable 
quarrel. 

Edmund Spenser, 1553-1599, was some years 
older than Marlowe, and like him a graduate of 
Cambridge. He was a friend of Sidney, and a 
courtier of Elizabeth, but we naturally associate him 



72 



Mature English, 



with Ireland, for the queen granted him three thou- 
sand acres in the county of Cork, as pay for services 
rendered her. His masterpiece is The Faerie Queen^ 
an unfinished allegorical poem. It is rich in ex- 
pression, and is one of the most luxurious and 
melodious of our descriptive poems. In it the au- 
thor shows the fruit of his study of Piers Plowman 
and Chaucer, and since the days of the latter 
of these writers, none so graced our literature 
as Spenser, and after him no equal arose until 
Shakespeare appeared. The Faerie Queen was to 
have consisted of twelve books, of which King 
Arthur w^as the hero. But six of these books were 
completed. The first is the gem of the series. In it 
we are introduced to the court of the Faerie Queen, 
with whom Arthur is in love. We find the Red-cross 
knight. Holiness^ as a militant Christian seeking 
the hand of Una, a beautiful woman representing 
Truth. The knight is seduced by Duessa, False- 
hood, and is reduced almost to despair, when by the 
intervention of Una, and the help of Faith, Hope, 
and Charity, he is rescued. In the other books the 
adventures of other knights, representing Temper- 
ance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy, are 
recounted, but they do not equal the first. These 
stories have been likened to Tennyson's Idyls 
of the King. Among Spenser's other works are 
The ShephercTs Calendar^ The Tears of the Muses, 
The Ruins of Time, and many others. 



Italian hifluence. 



73 



Richard Hooker, 15 53-1 600, was a divine who 
adhered to the EstabHshed Church as against the 
Puritans, who, since the days of Cranmer, had not 
ceased to oppose the governmental rehgion. Accord- 
ing to Hallam, Hooker was the first to adorn prose 
with the images of poetry, and though some critics 
object to the great length of his sentences, the best 
agree in admiring the beauty and dignity of his 
style. The latest essay on this author is a discrim- 
inating critique in Whipple's Literature of the Age 
of Elizabeth, Hooker is the ablest champion his 
church ever had, and his Ecclesiastical Polity^ on 
which his fame now mainly rests, is a monument 
of close reasoning supported by the most extensive 
learning. 

John Lyly, 15 53-1 601, is distinguished as the 
author of Eiiphues^ and Eicphues a?td his England , 
works immensely popular in the author's day, but 
which were out of print and neglected for two 
hundred and thirty-two years, that is, from 1636 
to 1868. The works treat of friendship, love, edu- 
cation, and religion, and their fastidious pedantry 
and effort after antithesis have given the term 
Euphuism to our language. 

William Shakespeare, 15 64-1 6 16, the brightest 
in the long line of immortal names that gild the 
pages of English literature, was born and died at 
Stratford-upon-Avon, and there he lies buried. This 



74 



Mature English, 



and very little more we know of his life. Like the 
records in the Scriptures of the life of some Hebrew 
worthy, it is not at all satisfying to curiosity. He 
was a companion of Ben Jonson, Sir Walter 
Raleigh, and others in their revels at the Mermaid 
and Falcon inns, and a man of social, if not of 
gayer habits of life. Coleridge described him as of 
oceanic mind, by which he intended to express the 
same idea of multitudinous unity, as when in an- 
other place he called him thousand-souled. In their 
grasp, variety, and moral teachings, as well as in 
aptness to promote spiritual strength, the works of 
Shakespeare stand among the world's books second 
only to the Bible. One chief reason for this is that 
of all books the Scriptures exerted the greatest 
formative and guiding influence on the mind of the 
dramatist, a fact that has been admirably pointed 
out by the Rev. Charles Wordsworth in an English 
work entitled The Bible and Shakespeare^ the fruit 
of much love for and deep study of each book. 
The Holy Bible and the wisdom of Shakespeare 
have moulded many of the strongest minds of the 
last three hundred years. Shakespeare's works are 
believed by some to contain more actual wisdom 
than the whole body of English learning, of course 
leaving mere science out of the question. He wrote 
thirty-seven plays — tragedies, comedies, and his- 
torical plays, among which in their classes, the 
following are probably the greatest : Macbeth^ 
King Lear, Romeo and jFuliet^ Hamlet, and Othello^ 



Italian Injliie7tce. 



75 



Midsummer Nighfs Dream^ As You Like it, and 
Merchant of Venice, and Richard III., Henry V., 
Ki?ig John, Coriolanus, and Julius Ccesar, Some 
authors may be said to equal Shakespeare in a 
particular point, but none possess his wonderful 
power of searching out and exhibiting the intimate 
workings of the human heart ; and it may safely 
be asserted that he leaves far behind him not only 
all dramatists, but all writers of fiction. 

The Authorized Version of the Bible^ i6ii, 
is a translation made by order of King James I., 
during the years 1607-1611, by a body of forty- 
seven divines. They were directed to take the 
Bishops' Bible printed in 1568, and based upon 
Cranmer's, as the foundation of their work. The 
labor was conducted in a spirit of affectionate ven- 
eration and carefulness, and the result was a book 
unequaled among literary works for its English, 
and embodying sublime eloquence, magnificent po- 
etry, beautiful imagery, and clear, impressive his- 
tory. The translators published an address "To 
the Reader," which was originally included in their 
volume. In it they give a history of the text, and 
of the former translations, from which the following 
passage is taken : " Truly wee neuer thought from 
the beginning, that we should neede to make a new 
Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good 
one ; but to make a good one better, or out of many 
good ones, one principall good one, not iustly to be 



76 Mature English, 



excepted against ; that hath bene our indeauour, 
that our marke." They say that they *'have set a 
varietie of sences in the margine/' — a practice 
which they support by argument, and they add a 
number of items of information about their work 
which are well worthy of perusal. As a philological 
power this translation has not had its equal, apart 
from its spiritual importance. 

Francis Bacon, 1561-1626, Lord Verulam, next 
to William Shakespeare was the brightest star of 
this period. Deeply involved during his whole life 
in the intricacies of public business, he found time, 
strange as it may appear, to produce his immortal 
works. Forever famous as a writer on philosophy, 
his Essays also stand among the most finished 
works in pure English literature, being character- 
ized by weighty thoughts, sound judgment, and 
elevated morality. While the language is spoken, 
these brief essays will continue to furnish food for 
thought, while his philosophical writings may be 
comparatively neglected in the advance of modern 
science. He is called the founder of the Baconian 
philosophy, or the Inductive system, for though it 
was applied before his time, he did more than any 
one, by his eloquence and brilliancy, to direct atten- 
tion to that which was overlooked. He was en- 
dowed with one of the most capacious and profound 
intellects ever possessed by man, and also with a 
wonderfully fertile imagination. His works are all 



Italian Influence. 



77 



reflective, and in a certain aspect poetical, and yet 
no prose v/riter was ever so concise as Bacon. His 
chief works are Essays^ The State of Europe^ His- 
tory of Henry VH, The Dignity and Advancement 
of Learnings and the Novu?n Organiim. 

Beaumont and Fletcher, were two dramatists 
who wrote together, as was then somewhat the 
fashion, and as we have now examples in Erck- 
mann-Chatrian in France. John Fletcher was born 
in 1576, and Francis Beaumont in 1586. They 
were both educated at Cambridge, and died, Beau- 
mont in 16 15, and Fletcher in 1625. They wrote 
with so intimate a union, that their separate con- 
tributions cannot be determined, and were popular, 
not so much on account of their scholarship as for 
their brilHancy and humor. Their numerous plays 
are marred by vulgarity and grossness. Among 
them are. Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, The 
Woman-Hater, The Faithful Shepherdess, The Two 
Noble Kinsmen, The Wild Goose Chase, Wit with- 
out Money, and The Coronation. 

Michael Drayton, 1563-163 i, was poet laure- 
ate in 1626, and wrote voluminously, with original- 
ity, but without the truly great comprehensive 
spirit of a poet. One of his works, Foly-Olhion, 
is a minute topographical description of England 
in thirty thousand wearisome lines. The Barons^ 
Wars is a metrical chronicle ; and Nymphidia 



78 



Mature English, 



is a fairy poem, which has been well styled one of 
the most deliciously fanciful creations in the lan- 
guage. 

John Donne, 1573-1631, w^as of Welsh extrac- 
tion, a Romanist by birth, but after studying the 
points of difference between Romanists and Prot- 
estants, he changed his faith, and attained promi- 
nence as Dean of St. Paul's, and as a foremost 
man of letters. After a youth of gayety, he em- 
braced the clerical profession, and became remark- 
able for his deep piety. His great intellectual 
powers were devoted to the production mainly of 
sermons and poems. The former have been highly 
extolled by Izaak Walton, one of his biographers, 
who ardently admired his friend Donne, but, in the 
calmer judgment of Hallam, there is not much in 
them worthy of being rescued from oblivion. Mr. 
Hallam further says : " His learning he seems to 
have perverted, in order to cull every impertinence 
of the fathers and schoolmen, their remote analo- 
gies, their strained allegories, their technical distinc- 
tions ; and to these he has added much of a sim- 
ilar kind from his own fanciful understanding." 
The poems of Dr. Donne are equally grotesque 
with his prose. They are crowded with far-fetched 
similes, painful puns, and extravagant metaphors, 
and these traits, though giving them temporary 
popularity, caused them long to be neglected. A 
discriminating taste, however, now finds in them 



Italian Influence. 



79 



many gems of much poetic beauty, which embody 
elevating conceptions. His chief works are, " Epi- 
thalaifiia^ Metempsychosis^ or the Progress of the 
Soul, Funeral Elegies, Divine Poems, and Songs 
and So7inets, He also wrote a book in vindication 
of suicide, entitled Biathanatos, published in 1651, 
in which the arguments are obscurely stated, and of 
which Mr. Hallam says : " No one would be induced 
to kill himself by reading such a book, unless he 
were threatened with another volume.'' Dr. Donne 
is said to have founded what Dr. Johnson called the 
Metaphysical School of Poetry, the authors in which 
appeared to aim to make their meaning as difficult 
to be found out as possible, using all the resources of 
great learning to conceal thought. Professor Reed 
says of it, that " It was deemed the perfection of 
poetry so to entangle every poetic image or impulse 
in a maze of scholastic allusions, in forced and arbi- 
trary turns of thought, paradoxes, antitheses, quaint- 
nesses, subtleties, that the reader's chief pleasure 
must have been the exercise of a correspondent 
and inappropriate ingenuity in discovering the path 
of the labyrinth. It could have been no more than 
the negative satisfaction of unraveling a riddle. . . . 
The irredeemable sin of this school of poetry was 
its sacrifice of nature, and consequently of poetic 

truth It demands not so much thought as 

shrewdness, acuteness, ingenuity, intellectual dex- 
terity ; or perhaps it would describe it more justly, 
as well as more favorably, to say that it demands 



8o 



Mature English. 



thought and nothing but thought, — no imagination, 
no passion, which are the life of real poetry." 

George Herbert, 1593-1632, was a younger 
brother of the deistical writer, Lord Edward Her- 
bert of Cherbury, with whose life and character he 
is so remarkably contrasted. An impartial judg- 
ment of his literary merit is difficult to obtain. 
His poetry is devotional, pure, and forcible, but is 
marred by the quaintness and fantastic imagery of 
the metaphysical school to which he belonged. 
The pure life of George Herbert, his gentleness 
and unction, and the beauty of a few of his less 
faulty poems, have given him a greater reputation 
than many of the poets of his school. He wrote 
The Temple^ in verse, and A Priest to the Temple^ 
in prose. The former is a collection of sacred 
poems, among which are the lines on "Virtue" 
beginning — 

" Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, 
The bridal of the earth and sky.'' 

It also contains the familiar verses on " Sunday," 
beginning — 

*' O day most calm, most bright. 
The fruit of this, the next world's bud-'' 

Ben Jonson, 15 74-1 63 7, who first drew the 
scenes for comedy from English home life, is by 
common consent accorded the position nearest to 



Italian Influence, 



8i 



Shakespeare, of whom he was a close companion, 
and \vith whom and kindred wits he was wont to 
enjoy the historic meetings at the Mermaid Inn. 
At the age of twenty-two he produced his first com- 
edy, Every Man in his Humor ^ which Hall am says 
is " an extraordinary monument of early genius, in 
what is seldom the possession of youth, — a clear 
and unerring description of human character, vari- 
ous and not extravagant beyond the necessities of 
the stage.'' Jonson was an assiduous worker, and 
it may well be doubted that he cherished envy 
toward his elder companion, Shakespeare, or that 
he indulged in wine bibbing and gluttony to the 
extent sometimes attributed to him. He was bluff 
and hearty, a true son of England, was a bril- 
liant wit, and appears to have been surrounded by 
an appreciative circle of talented persons, who were 
charmed by his society. His characters do not 
always present us representatives of large classes 
of society, but often exhibit peculiar specimens 
w^hich in the author's day assumed prominence. 
Among his other works are, Every Man out of his 
Hiwtor, Cynthia^ s Revels^ Sejanus, Catiline, Epicene, 
and The Alche^nist, 

John Ford, i 586-1 640, was the last of the orig- 
inal dramatists of this period. He appears to have 
been a melancholy man of retiring habits, and his 
writings are marked by pathos, intensity, and sweet- 
6 



82 



Mature English, 



ness, though deficient in variety. His powers are 
best shown in his tragedy of The Broken Heart, 

John Selden, 1584-1654, is known to the pres- 
.ent generation as the author of Table Talk^ a vol- 
ume first published by his amanuensis thirty years 
after his death. He was, however, the author of 
numerous historical and antiquarian works, and one 
of the most learned of the graduates of Oxford at 
the time. He made himself unpopular with the 
authorities by favoring the people in their strug- 
gles against the usurpations of king and clergy. 
His funeral sermon was preached by Archbishop 
Usher^ and his books were given by his executors 
to the Bodleian library. 



CHAPTER IX. 



MATURE ENGLISH. 

The Puritafi Influence^ 1649- 1660. 




|N Tuesday, January 30, 1649, King Charles 
I I. was publicly beheaded in front of White- 
! hall Banqueting-house. It was a place that 



had witnessed many strange scenes, — that old pal- 
ace of Whitehall. There Henry VIII. and Anne 
Bullen were married. Bishop Latimer preached in 
the court once, while King Edward VI. sat at a 
window to hear him. Sir Thomas Wyatt's Kentish 
rebels shotte divers arrowes into the courte in 
1554, thereby terrifying the fair dames about Bloody 
Mary. There Queen Elizabeth kept her library of 
Greek, Latin, Italian, and French books ; and there, 
in 1600, she appointed a Frenchman to do "feates 
upon a rope in the conduit court, the bear, the bull, 
and the ape to be bayted in the tilt court, and sol- 
emn dawncing on Wednesday," and in the great 
gallery the same virgin queen received the Speaker 
and the House of Commons, when they came to 
" move her grace to marriage." In the King's bed- 
chamber Guy Fawkes was examined, and taken 



84 Mature Ejiglish, 



thence to the Tower. There were performed some 
of those old masques that Ben Jonson loved to 
compose. But a change came — the old buildmg 
was destroyed, a new one erected, — and it was not 
long after Charles stepped out of an upper window 
to the scaffold, that Oliver Cromwell assembled his 
"Barebones Parliament/' as it was called, in the new 
Council Chamber, and there the Protector died too, 
in 1658. There John Milton acted as Cromwell's 
Latin secretary ; and there came Edmund W aller, 
Andrew Marvel, and sometimes a young man, after- 
ward better known, — John Dryden. 

The temporary triumph of the Puritans over the 
Cavaliers is marked by this change of inmates at 
Whitehall. For a hundred years almost, the strug- 
gle had been going on in the kingdom ; and on that 
Tuesday afternoon when King Charles was be- 
headed, the Commons ordered that the weekly post 
be stayed until the next morning at ten of the clock, 
in order that news of the crowning act might be 
spread throughout the land as speedily as possible. 
A night of distress intervened, for every one was 
astonished, curious to know what next would hap- 
pen, and anxious for his own personal safety or 
popularity. The beneficed clergy, members of the 
university, and civil officers, were in a state of fear, 
but it was unnecessary, for, with the exception of 
five prominent royalists, they were to be treated with 
moderation. 

The change at court exerted an unavoidable in- 



Puritan Influence, 



85 



fluence upon literature. The influence of the Puri- 
tan had long been felt, but now that the Cavalier 
was obliged to take a place in the background, the 
opposite party was left free to develop itself as well 
in literature as in morals and politics. 

We have limited the period to the eleven years 
of the Commonwealth, or the interregnum between 
the execution of Charles I. and the Restoration of 
Charles II., in 1660, when new fashions were intro- 
duced at court, and a new spirit came over authors 
as well as people. We must therefore speak not 
only of those who lived and wrote during the period 
as defined, but also of some others whose produc- 
tions were moulded or modified by Puritan princi- 
ples. Not a few of these appeared in their greatest 
glory after the Restoration, when the Puritans were 
hated and hunted from their homes. 

We should expect now to find prose developed 
more than poetry, for while the latter is the channel 
through which highly wrought emotion is expressed, 
discussions upon human rights, civil government, 
and religious subjects, are more naturally carried 
on in prose. The earnestness and power with 
which the Puritan authors wielded the native speech 
has left an impress upon our prose which can never 
be effaced. The period is, however, not entirely 
destitute of verse, for the Puritans found lyrical 
poetry well adapted to the purposes of song in 
Christian worship, and the sublime Milton has left 
us the great English epic, in a Paradise Lost, while 



86 



Mature English. 



some Cavaliers still sung their love- ditties, praised 
the banished king and queen, or ridiculed the face, 
fashion, and tones of the town's new teacher " — 
the Puritan. 

Francis Quarles, 1592-1644, was an ardent 
royalist, but his writings have a strong religious 
cast, and are much tinged with Puritanism and 
pious asceticism. He used the conceited and ex- 
travagant style of the period, which gave his poems 
popularity at first, but has caused them to be neg- 
lected since. His chief poems are, Divi7ie Em- 
blejns, Job Militant^ The History of Queen Esther^ 
and The Eeast of Worms. 

William Browne, 1590-1645, is known chiefly 
as the writer of Britannia's Pastorals^ The Inner 
Temple Masque^ and The Shepherd^s Pipe, These 
poems, written somewhat in the style of Spenser, 
combine pastoral poetry with allegory, are marked 
by some grace, and exhibit some facility of thought 
and originality of expression. 

William Drummond, 1585-1649, was the first 
Scotsman who wrote good English, and was also 
one of the most graceful poets of the time. He 
lived at Hawthornden, a lovely spot in the vicinity 
of Edinburgh, near Roslyn Castle. The poetic 
spirit of the romantic scenery of the glens and 
crags and beautiful banks of the river Eske seems 



Puritan Influence, 



87 



to have entered his soul and to have been breathed 
out in his verse. His chief works are, Flowers of 
Sion^ Wandering Muses, or the River Forth Feast- 
ing, and Sonnets. He was a friend of Ben Jonson, 
who visited him in his Scotch home, and of other 
Enghsh authors. Milton is said to have copied 
some of his images. 

Thomas Fuller, i 608-1 661, was an active royal- 
ist politician, a prominent theological writer of eu- 
phuistic style, and is said to have made more jokes 
in writing than any other man. He wrote Essays, 
Tracts, Ser^nons, The Worthies of Engla7id, Church 
History of Britaiti, The Holy and Profane State, 
and the History of the Holy War. His writings 
abound in lofty morality, deep feeling, eloquent 
pathetic passages, and romantic stories, and he is 
reputed one of the truest and greatest wits who 
ever lived. 

Abraham Cowley, 1618-1667, was also a royal- 
ist, of good education, who rose to a sudden popu- 
larity which has not increased in the lapse of time. 
This is accounted for by the fact that he is a repre- 
sentative of the so-called metaphysical school of 
poets. His principal works are, Miscellanies, Anac- 
reontics, Pindaric Odes, The Mistress, and The Da- 
videis. The last is an unfinished epic, which was 
intended to have recounted the glories of the King 
of Israel, a design which it is supposed the author 



88 



Mature English. 



relinquished with the feeling that Milton would 
produce a greater Scriptural poem than he could. 
Cowley's verse is forced and unnatural. His prose 
is simple, manly, and rhythmical. 

Jeremy Taylor, 1613-1667, whose works in 
vellum and gold still grace the boudoir and the 
cabinet, was the greatest divine of the age, a man 
of apostolic sublimity and sweetness of character. 
His Liberty of Prophesying was the first famous 
plea for tolerance in religion. It is remarkable as 
having been published just at the end of the Com- 
monwealth by an episcopalian and a royalist, and 
illustrates the influence of the Puritans on those 
outside of their own body. His other chief works 
are Holy Living and Dyings Life of Christy The 
Golden Grove^ and Ser?nons, Taylor has been 
called both the Shakespeare and the Spenser of 
divines, and he undoubtedly resembles the latter 
author in his prolific fancy, musical arrangement, 
prolonged and poetical descriptions, and in his 
musings, metaphors, and enthusiasm. His highly 
ornamental style is not exempt from the fantastic 
blemishes which characterize the age. 

George Wither, 1588-1667, is generally classed 
among the Puritan writers, notwithstanding his 
reputation as a poet was made before he became 
identified with that body. His life was one of 
great activity and reverses. He was at one time a 



Puritan Influence. 



89 



Major- General under Cromwell. His chief works 
are, Abuses Strip t and Whipt^ Shepherds^ Hu7iti7ig, 
Mistress of Fhilarete^ Emblems^ and a poem on 
Christmas. The second of these was composed in 
prison, into which he was thrown for writing the 
first, and in view of these circumstances it is a re- 
markable work. He wrote excellent English, but 
critics have been very much divided as to his merits 
as a poet and a man. 

Sir William Davenant, 1605-1668, was an 
energetic royalist, a great admirer of Shakespeare, 
and reminds us that we are approaching the era of 
the French influence. During the Protectorate he 
was banished to France, and at the Restoration he 
aided in the revival of the theatre, which had been 
closed since 1648. His principal poem was heroic 
and chivalrous, but of little merit, and was written 
in France. It is entitled Gondibert, 

John Milton, i 608-1 674, is a poet whose works 
are as current now as they were in his ov^n days. 
He was the son of an ardent republican, of old and 
gentle family, and from his early years was set apart 
to the service of patriotism and letters. His educa- 
tion was carefully conducted at home, at St. Paul's 
School, London, and finally at Cambridge. His 
remarkable life has very properly been divided into 
three natural periods. The first extends from 1623 
to 1640, during which he produced his Ode to the 



90 



Mature English. 



Nativity^ the Masque of Comus^ the pastoral elegy 
of Lycidas, the descriptive poems, Allegro, and // 
Penseroso, and his So7inets, Those gave the young 
author a high position among the poets of the na- 
tion, and charmed their readers by the tokens of 
genius, the graceful eloquence, and refined and 
courtly emotions they embody. Among the odes 
are one To the Nightingale, and another on the 
Massacre of the Fiedmontese Protestants, They all 
relate either to religion, patriotism, or domestic 
affection. The second period of Milton's life 
extends from 1640 to 1660, during which, being 
involved in political and religious controversy, he 
produced his marvellous prose writings. His lan- 
guage is forcible, eloquent, and grand, notwithstand- 
ing the inverted forms of expression and the words 
of Latin origin w^hich he used. Among his writ- 
ings at this time are, Of Reformation in England, 
The Reason of Church Government urged against 
Prelaty, Apology for Smectymnuus, Doctrine and Dis- 
cipline of Divorce, Areopagita, Speech for the Liberty 
of U7ilicensed Printi?tg, and The Likeliest Form to 
remove Hirelings out of the Church, These contain 
many eloquent passages, full of imagination, grand- 
eur, and exhibitions of the author's intense love of 
liberty. Not^vithstanding all, it is undisputed that 
Milton's prose is not of the best nor most idiomatic. 
We are brought now to the third and last period of 
Milton's life, extending from 1660 to 1674. He 
appears again as a poet, not in the exuberant fancy 



Ptirita7i hijlicence. 



91 



of youth, but in the matured richness of age. His 
writings of this era are, Paradise Lost, Paradise 
Regained, and Samson Agonistes, The first is un- 
doubtedly the greatest epic poem in the language, 
and is only comparable with the three other epics 
of Greece, Rome, and modern Italy. Homer, Vir- 
gil, Dante, Milton, are names that stand alone on 
the world's record. Mr. Shaw says, " As the antique 
world produced two great epic types, so did Chris- 
tianit}^, — Dante and Milton. Dante represents the 
poetic side of Catholic, Milton of Protestant Chris- 
tianity ; Dante its infancy, its age of faith and hero- 
ism ; Milton its virile age, its full development and 
exaltation. Dante is the Christian Homer, Milton 
the Christian Virgil. If the predominant character 
of Homer be vivid life and force, and of Virgil 
majesty and grace ; that of Dante is intensity, and 
of Milton is sublimity.'' In his tragedy of Samson 
Ag07tistes, Milton embodies his own blindness, suf- 
ferings, and resignation to God's will, in a touch- 
ing manner, and it fittingly closes his sublime 
career. 

Edmund Waller, 1605-168 7, was one of those 
whose personal character covers them with infamy, 
while their writings are admired for their grace, 
originality, beauty, and good sense. His father 
was a gentleman of large estates, and his mother 
was a sister of John Hampden. The latter circum- 
stance drew him toward the republicans, and he 



92 



Mature English. 



greatly distinguished himself on the popular side. 
But as he was equally ready to flatter Charles II. or 
to praise Cromwell, he is now considered a mean- 
souled man. His poems are graced with smooth- 
ness and polish, and he ranks high as an improver 
of English verse. His principal writings are Mis- 
cellaneous Poems ^ containing his Panegyric to the 
Lord Protector^ and Amatory Verses. 

Ralph Cudworth, i6 17-16 88, was a learned 
divine and philosopher, who wrote The True Intel- 
lectual System of the Universe^ a blow at the atheism 
of his day. He was Hebrew professor at Cam- 
bridge, and his work is a vast storehouse of learn- 
ing, and is unrivaled as a display of subtle and far- 
reaching speculation. 

John Bunyan, 1628-1688, was one of the most 
remarkable religious writers of any age. He was a 
tinker, and the son of a tinker, and yet he is known 
wherever our language is spoken, as the author of 
an allegory, the most simple, the most life-like, the 
most original and imaginative, the most captivating 
and affecting in the range of literature. Bunyan's 
Pilgrim's Progress is popular now — was popular 
when first published — with the aged and the young, 
the learned and the unlearned, the prince and the 
peasant. The author knew little of books, but he 
studied our grand English Bible, and was saturated 
with its spirit as well as words. He was indeed a 



Ptiritan hifluejice. 



93 



. man of one book, but that, the Book of Books. 
This gave him power, and as Lord Macaulay says, 
" Bunyan is as decidedly the first of allegorists, as 
Demosthenes is the first of orators, or Shakespeare 
the first of dramatists." 

Richard Baxter, i 615-1 691, was a voluminous 
writer, and one of the most eminent non-conformist 
divines of the day. During the civil war he sym- 
pathized with Parliament, but being a zealous ad- 
vocate of regular government in Church and State, 
he disapproved CromwelFs usurpation. His life was 
devoted to the promotion of piety and good morals, 
and his great merits were acknowledged by his dis- 
tinguished friends, Dr. Isaac Barrow, Bishop Wil- 
kins, and Sir Matthew Hale. He is reputed the 
author of near two hundred books, three of which 
were large folios, but none of them, excepting The 
Saiitfs Ever las ti?ig Rest^ and ^ Call to the Uncon- 
verted^ are much read. Like Bunyan, he used good, 
strong, homely English, and his works abound in 
choice and glowing imagery, and passages of hearty 
eloquence. 



A glance over this chapter will render our prog- 
ress manifest, and will prove that the period of the 
Commonwealth was not without its effect upon our 
literature. We first saw, as we opened it, the figure 
of quaint Francis Quarles bearing to our gathering 
stores of literary riches his Emblems^ Job Militant^ 



94 



Mature EnHish. 



and Feast of Worms ^ and not far behind was his 
younger friend Cowley, asking us to look at his 
Odes^ and only exhibiting his unfinished Davideis 
to tell us that he had left the field of epic poetry 
for another to occupy. Then, away up in Scotland, 
among the picturesque scenery of Hawthornden, we 
saw burly old Ben Jonson walking by the river 
Eske, admiring nature somewhat, but praising in 
higher terms the verse of the friend by his side, 
William Drummond, the first of his people to write 
good English. 

It was quite another picture when the witty Ful- 
ler appeared, cracking his jokes with his learned, 
fanciful, and somewhat younger companion Jeremy 
Taylor. Still younger was the eminent Hebrew 
professor Cudworth, who was piling up the vast 
stores of learning which have made his Intellectual 
System so formidable to ordinary readers, and so 
astonishing to the learned. 

There were three others who always hold the atten- 
tion of one who studies the days of the Puritan rule. 
Looking into Whitehall we saw John Milton acting 
as Latin secretary to the stern Roundhead who then 
occupied the home of the cavalier king. Had we 
followed him when he left that hall, we should have 
found the politician reassuming the poet's pen 
which he had dropped to become secretary. 

Had we gone forty-five miles from Whitehall in 
1660, we might have met in the common jail at 
Bedford, the most accomplished allegorist of all 



Puritan Iiifltience. 



95 



history. There he was confined for the twelve years 
that followed, and there he wrote his Pilgrim's 
Progress^ for his jailer was kind-hearted, and al- 
lowed him pen, ink, and paper, and for reading, 
Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Bible, 

As we closed the chapter, we had before us the 
frail body of that voluminous writer who gave us 
The Sainfs Everlasting Rest. Let us look into 
the famous Guildhall of London ; we may see him 
again for a moment. It is the room in which the 
Lord Mayors have annually feasted their sovereigns 
for two hundred years. As we look down toward 
the great gothic window, we see the bloated drunk- 
ard who became so celebrated as Judge Jeffreys, 
sitting in the midst of a group of lawyers and jury- 
men. Before them, frail, feeble, and helpless, stands 
Baxter trying to make himself heard. But all his 
efforts are fruitless. The brutal judge roars " Rich- 
ard, Richard 1 Dost thou think we will let thee 
poison this court t Thou hast written books enough 
to load a cart, and every book as full of sedition as 
an egg is full of meat ! We hear the jury meekly 
render a verdict of " guilty," —• we ask not of what, 
— and, as the officers lead their unresisting prisoner 
to jail, we retire and breathe more freely as we 
become conscious that we are in the atmosphere of 
the nineteenth century ! 



CHAPTER X. 




Mature English. 

The French Influence^ 1660-1700. 

[HE battle of Naseby was fought by the re- 
organized army of Parliament under Crom- 
well and Fairfax, and the royal forces led 
by Lord Astley, Prince Rupert, and King Charles 
I. himself It decided the fate of the king. Five 
thousand Cavaliers were taken prisoners, and the 
result was that Charles delivered himself up to the 
Scots, who in turn delivered him to the English 
Parliament, and, as we have already seen, he was 
beheaded in 1649. The king's eldest son, Charles, 
left England after the battle of Naseby, in 1645, 
the age of fifteen. Four years later, upon hearing 
of his father's execution, he assumed the title of 
king, with no prospect then of ascending the throne. 
Nor did the prospect brighten much until fifteen 
years more had passed over his head. During the 
interval the fortunes of the young prince had been 
quite varied. A portion of the time had been passed 
at the Louvre as guest of Louis XIV., who was 
eight years his junior, but who taught him lessons 



French Influence, 



97 



that were never forgotten. The dissipation, extrav- 
agant tastes, and luxurious living at the French 
court were congenial to the English prince, and 
it is now our purpose to trace their effects at his 
home. 

Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, and a strong man 
was needed to take his place. His successor was 
not able to carry on the government as the Protec- 
tor had done, and the result was confusion and dis- 
cord, from which the nation was glad to be relieved 
by the restoration of the Stuart dynasty in 1660. 
On the eighth of May of that year, Charles II. was 
proclaimed king in London. He was at the Hague, 
but soon set out for England, landing at Dover on 
the twenty-fifth. It was about noon, the shore 
was lined with a gallant array of horsemen, citizens, 
and noblemen ; the mayor came out to receive the 
king, and presenting him a Bible, his majesty said 
it was the thing he loved above all things in the 
world — then he spoke a few words beneath a 
canopy that was provided for the purpose, and 
getting into a stately coach, was driven off to Can- 
terbury, amid shouts and expressions of joy, which 
an eye-witness says were " past imagination." 

Men began now to set up " King's Arms," to 
drink the king's health, and to shout, " God bless 
King Charles II. ! " The simple circumspect Puri- 
tan, with his sober manners and grave dress, is 
either absent or overlooked, and in his stead we see 
in the streets, in the drawing-rooms, at church, men 
7 



98 Mature English, 



wearing brilliant satin doublets, with slashed sleeves, 
rich point-lace collars, a short cloak carelessly 
hanging from one shoulder, and a low-crowned 
Flemish beaver hat, with graceful plumes on their 
heads. They wore long curling ringlets, that waved 
about their shoulders, and bore rapiers in their gor- 
geously embroidered sword-belts. Shame was gone, 
for the court gave an example of undisguised licen- 
tiousness which the people eagerly copied. The 
theatres were reopened ; a new splendor was given 
the performances ; the female characters were per- 
sonated by women, the scenery was dazzling, the 
dresses more gay \ virtue, truth, and modesty were 
jeered at ; the profligate triumphed, Shakespeare 
fell into disfavor, and such as Wycherley were 
honored. 

In a word, the Puritan loved piety and Presby- 
terianism ; Charles loved amusement, and agreed 
to profess Roman Catholicism. The Puritans re- 
strained the people from gay debaucheries ; Charles 
encouraged them. They upheld virtue in public and 
in private ; he had no shame, and blasphemed all 
virtue everywhere. 

The reaction was complete. Black suits and out- 
ward morality gave precedence to ribbons, embroid- 
eries, flowing plumes, and loose morals. Literature 
was no less affected than life, for though Puritans 
continued to write, as John Bunyan was doing at 
the moment of the coronation of the restored king, 
they were not fashionable, nor were their writings 
popular. 



French Influence. 



99 



Samuel Butler, i6 12-1680, the well-educated 
son of a yeoman, enjoyed the companionship of 
John Selden, author of the Tai^/e Talk^ and other 
advantages which his native brightness led him to 
improve. He is remembered as the author of Hudi- 
bras, a burlesque poem of eleven thousand lines, 
in which he aimed to render ridiculous the habits, 
manners^ customs, and doctrines of the Puritans. 
It is full of sententious epigrammatic wit, puns, and 
jokes, often of too broad a character to please a 
refined taste. Published just after the accession 
of the new king, it was exceedingly popular with 
the royalists, and the author rose to a high fame, 
from which the ephemeral nature of the poem has 
since served to detract somewhat. Still, Butler is 
considered the greatest among burlesque writers. 

Thomas Otway, 1651-1685, a young writer whose 
life was full of misery, was the best tragic writer of 
the period. Among his works are The Orphan^ and 
Veiiice Preserved^ which are pathetic, intense, elo- 
quent, and sometimes graceful, but on account of 
the fact that they are disfigured by so much of the 
fashionable license of the day, they cannot now be 
performed as they were written. 

Sir George Etheridge, 1636-1694, was a comic 
dramatist of ancient family and excellent education. 
He is credited with originating the new style of 
gross immorality, in which, however, he was out- 



100 



Mature E7iglish. 



stripped by his successors. He wrote She Would 
if She Could, and The Man of Mode, Notwithstand- 
ing his elegance, he Hved in dissipation and died in 
a debauch. 

John Dryden, 1631-1700, the son of an ardent 
Puritan of ancient family, began his literary life 
with an Eulogy on Cromwell, but soon suddenly 
forgot his birthright, and welcomed the return of 
Charles II. The remainder of his life was little 
more than a series of efforts after literary popular- 
ity. Like many professional authors, he wrote a 
great deal which betokens negligence. With all his 
defects he is one of the greatest masters of vigorous 
idiomatic English prose, and of powerful majestic 
verse. He substituted cold mannerisms for natural 
language, because tinsel and gilt were more popular 
than strong sense and solid merit. This foreign 
disease affected him, and weakened his English 
heart-power. His earliest and latest efforts were 
in verse, and in the interval, like Milton, he pro- 
duced his prose. Among the latter works are An 
Essay o?i Dramatic Poesy, various Prefaces and 
Dedications, the Conquest of Granada, Marriage 
a-la-Mode, and the Spanish Friar, In the first 
mentioned the author appears as a critic, and has 
been well characterized as the first one of catho- 
licity of taste and courageous expression. Being 
marked by the bad as strongly as by the good points 
of his age, his plays are immoral, but contain many 



French Influence. 



lOI 



passages of literary merit. Among his poems, be- 
sides the eulogies mentioned are, Annus Mirahilis^ 
Absalom and Achitophel^ Mac-Flecknoe, Religio Laid, 
The Hind and Panther, translations of the Satires 
of Juvenal, and Perseus, of VirgiVs Georgics and 
the jFneid^ and Fables, These are of various de- 
grees of excellence. 

Samuel Pepys, 163 2-1 703, stands almost alone 
in his peculiar style of writing. Born of an ancient 
family, but in humble circumstances, he managed 
to obtain a naval office, which he held under 
Charles II. and James II., in which he had oppor- 
tunities not only of improving the fleet, but also 
of observing all the court intrigues. He recorded 
in cipher all that he saw, and with a wonderful 
minuteness. After a century and a half his Diary 
was deciphered and published. It presents in a 
most vivid and entertaining manner, all the details 
of dress, amusements, public and private events, 
and gossip of the day, so that it has the interest of 
a dramatic novel. 

John Locke, 1632-1704, imbibed the spirit of 
liberty and their religious principles from the Pu- 
ritans. After his graduation at Oxford, he read 
the works of Francis Bacon, and became a convert 
from the scholasticism of the Universities to the 
Baconian system of philosophy. He took a lively 
interest in public matters, and was very much in 



102 



Matiive English, 



the society of the most distinguished politicians 
and men of letters. His first work in English is 
the Essays on the Hianan U?ide?^sta?idi?ig^ the 
fruit of nearly twenty years of laborious thought, 
and probably the first attempt in any language 
at a comprehensive sur\'ey of the whole mind and 
its faculties. It is the work by which the author 
is best known^ and it has exerted a powerful in- 
fluence upon the course of philosophical inquiry 
and opinion ever since. Among his other works 
are, Letters on Tole7'ation, Thoughts concerni?ig 
Education^ two treatises on Civil Govern?nent^ The 
Conduct of the U?ide?'standtng, and the Reasoii- 
ableness of Christianity. Locke is described as a 
man of the most charming personal character, in 
whom delicacy, forbearance, and true nobility were 
united with the simplicity of an unpretending 
scholar, in as near perfection as man has ever ex- 
hibited them. 

John Evelyx, 1620-1706, was a man of good 
family who appears to have preserved the purity 
of his personal character in the midst of the 
general corruption. His chief works are, Sylva^ 
a treatise on forest trees, Terra^ a work on agri- 
culture and gardening, and his Eiary, in which 
he gives a minute and valuable picture of the times. 

William Wycherley, 1640-17 15, the son of roy- 
alist parents, was sent to France to be educated. 



Fre7ich Lifliience, 



103 



whence he returned a fine gentleman and a papist. 
After studying a year or two at Oxford, he entered 
upon a career of gentlemanly dissipation, and im- 
moral authorship. His principal plays are, Love in 
a Wood, the Country Wife, and the Flai7i- Dealer, 
all of which reflect the impurity of the writer's per- 
sonal character, and the superficial polish of the 
age. He borrowed from the French the plot and 
morals of some of his works, and it must be added, 
has wonderfully debased them both. Lord Macau- 
lay's Essay on the Comic Dramatists of the Restora- 
tion should be read by all who desire to study this 
period. 

Gilbert Burnet, 1643-1715, was bishop of 
Salisbury, one of our most voluminous writers, and 
at the same time both active as a politician and 
eloquent as a preacher. His works are not of the 
highest merit, but they are valuable for reference 
as containing many facts not elsewhere found. 
Among them are, the History of the Reformation 
in England, Life and Death of the Earl of Roches- 
ter, History of my Own limes, Exposition of the 
Thirty-nine Articles, and Lives of Sir Matthew Hale, 
and Bishop Bedell, Burnet was a man of rare can- 
dor and tolerance. His birth and predilections 
place him on middle ground between the extremists 
of the Episcopalians and Presbyterians. 

Robert South, 1663-17 16, after a course of 



104 Mature English, 



brilliant scholarship at Oxford, became one of the 
most witty, talented, and popular preachers of his 
day. His Sermons are written in an interesting 
style, and are pithy, pointed, and striking. He is 
considered to belong to the Arminian school of 
divines. He often preached before Charles II., 
and on one occasion used the following language : — 

Who that had seen Masaniello, a poor fisherman, 
wdth his red cap, and his angle, would have reck- 
oned it possible to see such a pitiful thing, within 
a week after, shining in his cloth of gold, and with 
a word or a nod, commanding the whole city of 
Naples ? And who that had beheld such a bank- 
rupt, beggarly fellow as Cromwell, first entering the 
Parliament House, with a threadbare, torn cloak, 
greasy hat (perhaps neither of them paid for), 
could have suspected that, in the space of so few 
years, he should, by the murder of one King and 
the banishment of another, ascend the throne ? 
Though a stanch royalist and an unsparing op- 
ponent of Puritanism, Dr. South merits admiration 
for his noble refusal to accept of preferment, prof- 
fered on account of his political and religious prin- 
ciples. He is the subject of many jocose anecdotes, 
and the sarcastic definition of gratitude, that it is 

a sense of obligation for favors expected," is at- 
tributed to him. 



Joseph Addison, 1672-17 19, exercised a more 
extensive and beneficial influence on our literature 



French Infliunce, 



than any man of his day. The style that he formed 
is still honored, and is more pure, correct, and fas- 
cinating than any author had possessed before him. 
He was educated at Oxford, where he was espe- 
cially distinguished for his Latin verse, a fact 
which in connection with his thorough acquaintance 
with the Latin poets, accounts for the latinity of 
his style. With regard to the moral service his 
essays rendered literature and society. Lord Macau- 
lay says in the Edinburgh Review^ "There still 
lingered in the public mind a pernicious notion 
that there was some connection between genius 
and profligacy, — between the domestic virtues and 
the sullen formality of the Puritans. That error 
it is the glory of Addison to have dispelled. He 
taught the nation that the faith and morality of 
Hale and Tillotson might be found in company 
with wit more sparkling than the wit of Congreve, 
and with humor richer than the humor of Van- 
brugh. So effectually indeed did he retort on vice 
the mockery that had recently been directed against 
virtue, that since his time the open violation of 
decency has always been considered among us as 
the sure mark of a fool. And this revolution, — 
the greatest and most salutary ever effected by any 
satirist, — he accomplished, be it remembered, with- 
out writing one personal lampoon." We may add 
that it was on account of the cheerful piety which 
Addison exemplified in his life, that he could do 
this. A master of pure eloquence, he was able to 



io6 Mature English, 

paint life and manners, and to use the dangerous 
weapon of satire in such a way as to effect a social 
reform. Can we imagine an impulse of this kind 
coming from any other man of the period ? At an 
early age he began to write poetry, producing, A 
Poem to His Majesty^ Letter from Italy ^ and The 
Campaign^ written in praise of the Duke of Marl- 
borough, after the victory of Blenheim. His reputa- 
tion, however, rests principally upon his numerous 
Essays written for the Tatler^ Spectator, and Guar- 
dia7t^ in which he evinced a brilliancy, humor, taste, 
and refinement, far in advance of any essayist 
Six years before his death his tragedy of Cato was 
put upon the stage. It was received with great 
applause, and was translated into French, Italian, 
and German. His latest work. Evidences of the 
Christian Religion^ was left unfinished. In some 
of his Essays, Addison incorporated hymns which 
are marked by a spirit of tender piety and beauty 
of diction that has so commended them to the 
Christian Church, that they are included in the 
most modern collections of church psalmody. 
Among these are those beginning, — 

The spacious firmament on high 
With all the blue, ethereal sky ." . . . 
*' How are thy servants blest, O Lord ! 
^' When all thy mercies, O my God ! " and — 
" When rising from the bed of death." 

Sir John Vanbrugh, i 666-1 726, was of Dutch 



French Influence, 



107 



ancestry, the son of a rich sugar-baker, and besides 
being a dramatist, was one of the first architects of 
his age. He designed the Palace of Blenheim, which 
government erected for the Duke of Marlborough, 
and many other buildings. Among his comedies 
are The Relapse^ The Provoked Wife, The Provoked 
Husba7id^ ^sop, and The Confederacy. They are 
crowded with consistent but exaggerated pictures 
of low life and intrigues. The author became 
ashamed of wh^t he had written, and in later life 
planned a new comedy with a virtuous wife as the 
heroine, but he left the work incomplete \ and it was 
finished by another, with the title of the Provoked 
Husband., as above. 

Jeremy Collier, 1650-1726, an eminent dissent- 
ing divine, was educated at Oxford, and wrote many 
pamphlets of satirical character, and Essays on 
moral subjects. He is remembered, however, as 
the author of A Short View of the Pnmorality a?id 
Profaneness of the English Stage, which resulted in 
a discussion of stage morals, continuing for ten 
years. In this discussion Congreve and Vanbrugh 
took part. They looked in vain to Dryden for help, 
but though that author confessed that Collier's stric- 
tures were just, he failed to amend. The eyes of 
the people were opened, however, and a purer taste 
led very slowly to a purer stage. 

Sir Isaac Newton, 1642-17 2 7, the son of a re- 



io8 Mature English. 

specrable cirizen of Lincolnshire, is universally ac- 
knowledged :o hold the highest rank among natural 
philosophers of all ages. At the age of twent]/- 
tvro he discovered the Binomial Theorem ; at 
twent}'-three he invented Fluxions : at twenty-four 
he demonstrated the lav; of gravitation with regard 
to the movement of the planets about the sun : and 
at tv;ent}'-seven he revolutionized the study of optics 
by discovering the non-h jmogeneit}' of light, and the 
diftering refrangibility of the rays of which it is 
composed. His writings belong to the domain of 
science rather than o: literature. They are. Prin- 
cipia, Opt::s, Oi'S-sr: :::::::s r: B::k :f Da-:::^ and 
tr. -: A: : : a.ypse. and Chro/iology oj tne A?: cicnt King- 
do /ns. 

Sir Richard Steele, 1671-1729. was a wild 
young man, and of irregular habits throughout life. 
After getting and losing several fortunes, he died in 
extreme poverty. In the midst of his youthful dis- 
sipations he produced The Chr:s::an Her:, a moral 
and religious treatise, embodying the lofhest senti- 
ments of piety and virtue. He was at the time prob- 
ably intending reformation. The next year he pro- 
duced a comedy entitled, The Tunerah or Grief a-Ia- 
m:de, which was followed by others, also in contrast 
to his hrst work. These were not so successful 
as the author desired, and in 1709, on the twelfth 
of April, he began to publish The TatUr^ a t ri- weekly 
periodical, containing essays and news. In this 



French Infliiejice, 109 

Steele was aided by his old schoolfellow Addison, 
to a limited extent. It was followed by The Spectator 
and The Guardian^ in both of which Addison was a 
very important helper. The world owes to Steele's 
fertile imagination, the characters of Will Honey- 
co?7ib, Sir Roger de Coverley, and others of the Spec- 
tator club. His style was dramatic in its inventions, 
and he drew his characters with liveliness and facil- 
ity, but it appears that some of his inventions were 
much modified and improved by the more refined 
taste of Addison. At a later period Steele wrote a 
comedy entitled The Conscious Lovers, which is re- 
markable as being the first one since the Restora- 
tion that can be called moral. 

William Congreve, 1670-1729, was another of 
the brilliant but licentious dramatists of the period. 
He was of good family^ thoroughly educated, and 
as he was well paid for his writings, was free from 
the usual pecuniary distresses of his contemporaries. 
He left a large fortune, 0,000; was regarded 
with great admiration by the poets, and frequented 
the most learned as well as the most splendid soci- 
ety of his time. In point of immorality his plays 
are second only to Wycherley. Among his come- 
dies are, The Old Bachelor, The Double Dealer, Love 
for Love, and The Way of the World. Of these 
Love for Love is esteemed his masterpiece. He 
wrote but one tragedy, which is entitled the Mourn- 
ing Bride, 



no 



Mature English, 



We began this chapter with a view of Samuel 
Butler holding the Puritans up to ridicule, which 
was significant of the change that had come over 
the spirit of politics and literature. Going from bad 
to worse, we found Dryden, Etheridge, Vanbrugh, 
Congreve, and Wycherley in various degree con- 
tributing to the debasement of morals and manners. 
But the evil brought the remedy, and Jeremy Collier 
only reflected the disgust which had been bred in 
honest men's minds, when he gave his Short View 
to the world, and opened the purifying discussion 
that followed its publication. 

There were light as well as dark scenes in our 
view of the era, for did we not see Sir Isaac Newton 
pushing philosophical and scientific investigation 
further into the realms of the unseen, than man had 
ever before looked ? Did we not see Joseph Addi- 
son, the polished and the pure, proving forever that 
indecency is folly, and that faith and morality may 
be the companions of wit and humor ? 

There is only one more scene to remember, but it 
was somewhat influential. There were no news- 
papers worthy of the name in those days, and the 
centres of information, wit, and criticism were at 
the Coffee Houses, some of which became very cele- 
brated. We have already seen Shakespeare, Jon- 
son, Raleigh, and others at the Mermaid Inn ; let 
us look a moment upon a group we may find in what 
is known as WilPs, or the Wits' Coffee House, Mr. 
Pepys says he dropped in, coming home from the 



Fre7ich Influence, 



III 



Covent Garden Theatre one ni'ght, and heard very 
witty and pleasant discourse. In a room on the 
first floor there was a chair by the fireside or at the 
principal table, for the great literary lion of the day, 
— the author of the Hind and the Panther. Around 
Dryden were gathered such men as Wycherley, Gay, 
Addison, and others of the wits of the time. There 
young Pope was brought to see the great poet, and, 
he says, Dryden was a plump man with a down look, 
and not very conversable. Another describes him 
as a decent old man, arbiter of critical disputes. 
Gathered in little groups about the tables these 
men ate and drank, snuffed and smoked, gossiped 
and joked and criticized their songs, epigrams, and 
satires. The coffee-house was a great London in- 
stitution, but it is gone now, and men meet more 
with women, since society has advanced to a higher 
level. 



CHAPTER XI. 



MATURE ENGLISH. 

Influence of the People^ 1700 - 1870. 

I. THE AGE OF POPE, I70O-I745. 

|N our last chapter we saw Steele issuing his 
! Tatler three times a week : on Tuesday, 
• Thursday, and Saturday, for the conven- 
ience of the post j and we remember the elegant 
and fashionable papers that he published in it, and 
which were afterwards continued in the Spectator^ 
for the upper and more polished classes of society. 
A different class of readers had sprung up, however \ 
and the people, stimulated by the example of their 
superiors, perhaps, or by the increase of intelligence, 
desired a literature appropriate to them. This de- 
mand Daniel Defoe attempted to supply, and in 
1704 began the publication of his Review^ which was 
continued until 17 12. This was written in the inter- 
est of the people, and contained much political dis- 
cussion. Five years after the Review was begun, 
Steele published the first number of the Tatler, 
The two periodicals differed, as has been shown, in 
the class of readers for which they were intended, 



Age of Pope, 



113 



and the influence of the boldness manifested by De- 
foe in criticizing the government and the court in the 
name of the people, has never been forgotten in its 
results. This writer was the son of a non-conform- 
rst butcher ; was of the people, knew their feelings, 
sympathized with them ; and with copiousness, ex- 
uberance, and an inexhaustible power of conception, 
fought the battles of constitutional liberty, in op}X)si- 
tion to the encroachments of the Jacobites. Thus, 
through Defoe, the people began to exert their in- 
fluence upon literature as well as upon politics, — 
an influence which they still refuse to relinquish. 

We have already learned that this period may 
very properly be considered under four divisions. 
With the first of these the literary life of Alexander 
Pope corresponds almost to a year. Much has 
been written on the merits of this poet, and, while 
there is a wide divergence of opinion regarding 
his productions, his name is by some classed with 
those of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and 
Dryden. His admiration of the latter writer, his 
predilections for antiquity, and his early study of 
the classical poets, begat that love of elegance and 
polish which form marked traits of his poetry. He 
sought literary excellence as a good in itself, and 
lost sight of all other aim in writing. The same 
elegance and polish are prominent characteristics 
of other writers of the age of Queen Anne, and it 
has been called, we think erroneously, the Augustan 
Age of English literature. 

8 



114 



Injluence of the People* 



Daniel Defoe, 1661-1731, begins the list of 
writers of the period of the people's influence, and 
very properly, for he appealed to the people, fought 
for them, suffered for them, and was gladly heard 
by them. Belonging to the dissenters, he was ex- 
cluded from the highest educational advantages, 
and therefore engaged in mercantile enterprises, 
but apparently with little success. Entering polit- 
ical life as an Independent, he wrote tracts and 
pamphlets almost without number. Among these 
the Triie-horn Englishman became immediately 
popular. In 1702, he wrote the Shortest Way with 
Dissenters^ in which, in the character of a high 
churchman, he ironically proposed hanging the 
ministers and banishing the people who did not 
conform to the religion of government. His polit- 
ical efforts brought him to the pillory and prison. 
Upon his liberation he determined to write moral 
and religious works, and in pursuance of this reso- 
lution, published the Fa7nily Instructor^ and Relig- 
ious Courtship, In 17 19, at the age of fifty-eight, he 
began a career of fictitious authorship, which has 
carried his name down to posterity. Among his 
writings of this class are, the Life and Surprising 
Adventures of RoI)i7ison Crusoe^ Life a7td Piracies 
of Captain Siitgleton^ Journal of the Plague in 1665, 
Memoirs of a Cavalier^ and the Political History of 
the Devil. Resembling Bunyan in his unlimited 
command of plain, straightforward English, and 
being able to throw a remarkable air of reality into 



Age of Pope. 



115 



his fiction, he creates a wonderful sympathy between 
his heroes and the reader. His Memoir of a Cava- 
lier and your7ial of the Plague were thus both of 
them accepted by intelligent men as narratives of 
fact. In addition to a vast number of other works, 
Defoe published his tri-weekly Review^ which ex- 
hibited force and vigor. The moral teachings of 
his writings are generally unexceptionable. 

John Gay, 1688-1732, was an amiable and pop- 
ular poet who wrote in the spirit of the former 
age of dependence upon the great. At the age of 
twenty-six he produced The Shepherd^s Week, which 
was followed by Trivia, or the Art of Walking the 
Streets of Lo?idon, and other pieces. His fame 
rests, however, upon his Fables, his ballad oi Black- 
Eyed Susa?i, and the Beggar^ s Opera, The last, 
though of exceptionable morals, was very successful, 
and the author was well paid for his labors. Gay 
spent his later years as a member of the household 
of the Duke of Queensberry, where, as Thackeray 
says, " he was lapped in cotton, and had his plate 
of chicken, and his saucer of cream, and frisked, 
and barked, and wheezed, and grew fat, and so 
ended." He was buried in Westminster Abbey. 

Alexander Pope, i 688-1 744, the most brilliant 
writer of this period, who has been called the 
" prince of the artificial school of English poetry," 
was the delicate son of a wealthy retired merchant. 



1 1 6 htfluence of the People. 

who lived on the borders of Windsor Forest. Pope 
was of irregular education, was fond of fashionable 
society, an admirer of Dryden, a protege of Wycher- 
ley, and the friend of many a worthier man of note. 
His poems exhibit ease, grace, terseness, wit^ beauty 
of versification, and good taste, but they are deficient 
in genius, sublimity, catholicity, and other traits 
of the true poet. His intimacy with Lord Boling- 
broke, who was a skeptic and libertine, is apparent 
in its bad influence upon some of Pope's works, 
but is especially manifest in his Essay on Man, 
otherwise one of the best of his efforts. Among 
his other works are, Ode to Solitude, written at nine 
years of age. Essay on Criticism, Rape of the 
Lock, Translation of the Iliad of Homer, and the 
Dimciad, 

Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745, was an intellectual 
giant whose genius was clouded by mysterious cir- 
cumstances that have never been explained. He 
was a morbidly sensitive youth, and his life, passed 
amid the conflicts of improper love-passions, ended 
in the gloom of insanity, which had probably been 
smouldering in his nature through many years of 
his enigmatical life. Through the influence of the 
Tory party, to which he belonged, he became Dean 
of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, but he had little 
religious feeling. His works, though models of 
idiomatic English, forcible satire, keen humor, and 
vigorous imagination, are in parts so marked by his 



Age of Pope, 



117 



infidelity, malignity, and filthiness as to be of per- 
nicious tendency. His principal works are, Political 
Pamphlets, Tale of a Tub, Gulliver"^ s Travels, and 
An Argument showing the Inconvenience of Abolish- 
ing Christianity. 

James Thomson, i 700-1 748, was a graceful poet 
of romantic tastes and lazy habits. His attention 
was turned from divinity to poetry, when at the 
University of Edinburgh, by a suggestion of the pro- 
fessor of divinity, who told Thomson that if he in- 
tended to become a minister he must keep a stricter 
rein over his imagination. He had the faculty of 
looking at common things in a poetic manner, and 
versified with purity of diction and harmony of 
rhythm. He was one of the first Scotchmen who 
attained eminence as writers of English poetry. 
Thomson's Seasons contain many charming descrip- 
tions of nature, of which he was exceedingly fond. 
The Castle of Indoleiice is another composition in 
verse, written in the beautiful style of Spenser's 
Faery Queen, and exhibiting the traits of Thomson's 
character and life. Among his other productions 
is an ambitious poem entitled Liberty, which he 
considered his masterpiece, but it has never been 
popular. 

Isaac Watts, 1674-1748, was the precocious son 
of a pious teacher of Southampton. After a thor- 
ough education, begun at home, and finished at 



ii8 



hifliioice of the People, 



various good schools, he became a dissenting 
preacher. In consequence of the failure of his 
health, he became the guest of Sir Thomas Abney, 
at whose house he was entertained for thirt}'-six 
years. With no cares to disturb him, Dr. Watts 
pursued his studies, and produced his Hy77nis of 
various degrees of literar}' merit, but of a singularly 
pure Christian tone : his Logic and his l7nprove77ie7it 
of the Mhid, upon which his wide reputation firmly 
rests. The sacred poetn.- of Dr. Watts has so 
firm hold upon the affections of Christians ever}'- 
where, that no collection of psalms or hymns is 
considered complete without a large number of 
those composed by him. A late judicious writer 
observes, The period of English hymnolog}' ush- 
ered in by Watts, continued by Doddridge and 
the Wesleys, is in some respects more marked 

than any in the history of Christian song 

Up to his time nothing but versions of the Psalms 
— the standard of perfection, in which was, frst, 
literal and prosaic adherence to the original, and 
secoidly, rhyme or its caricature — had any acknowl- 
edged right to a place in worship He as- 
serted the right of a Ch7'istia7i hy77i7i, founded on 
any portion of inspired truth, to take its place in 
the service of song. The ancient Church had ac- 
knowledged it : the churches of the Reformation 
had acknowledged it. Watts gained the right for 
his psalms and hymns, and so for all, by writing 
such as were so superior that they compelled the 



Age of Pope, 



119 



recognition He unloosed the spirit of Chris- 
tian song, which soared aloft and has been brooding 
over choice souls, ever since. To Dr. Watts we 
are indebted for Doddridge, Toplady, the Wesleys, 
Cowper, Newton, Anne Steele, Bishop Heber, Lyte, 
Montgomery. He created the hymnology to which 
they made such rich additions." Apart, how^ever, 
from his labors in this direction, Dr. Watts exer- 
cised a powerful influence in the formation of pub- 
lic opinion, and his WTitings have contributed much 
to keep alive the spirit of freedom, toleration, and 
piety wherever the English language is spoken. 

Lord Bolingbroke, 1678-1751, was a friend of 
Pope and Swift, a man of elegance of manners, 
of dissipated early life, of political intrigues, and 
of deistical principles, but as a writer possessing a 
stately and flowing style, full of words and finish, 
but deficient in accuracy, depth, and heartiness. 
Political considerations forced him into a voluntary 
banishment to France, where he produced the 
greater part of his wTitings. Among them are. Re- 
flections 071 Exile, Letters on the Study of History^ 
and Letter o?i the True Use of Retirement, Upon his 
return he wrote The Ldea of a Patriot King. Bo- 
lingbroke is now little read, another proof that 
infidel writers seldom enjoy long-continued popu- 
larity. 

Bishop Berkeley, 1684-1753, was an enthusi- 



I20 



Influence of the People. 



astic, romantic, and pure-minded philosopher, who 
united philanthropy and learning to the finest 
traits of the Irish character. He was a native of 
Kilkenny County, Ireland, and rose to be Bishop 
of Cloyne, in which ofHee he died. He was a man 
of great genius, but of Utopian schemes. He ar- 
gued that all sensible qualities, such as hardness, 
figure, etc., are mere ideas without material exist- 
ence. His Christian benevolence led him to form 
a purpose to convert the American savages to 
Christianity, but his plans failed, though he spent 
five years in this country. He became a patron of 
Yale College, then in its infancy, and took a deep 
interest in Columbia College, New York. Being 
fully convinced of the future greatness of America, 
he wrote the prophetic and almost proverbial lines 
in which occur the words, — 

"Westward the course of empire takes its way ! " 

Berkeley was a friend of Pope, Steele, Swift, and 
the other wits of the day, who, while they loved 
him, and admired his purity and enthusiasm, 
laughed at his benevolent vagaries. His chief 
works are. The Theory of Vision^ Principles of Hu- 
man Knowledge^ and The Miiiiite Philosopher, 

Henry Fielding, i 707-1 754, was a writer of 
noble birth, good education, and dissipated habits,' 
who having become a London police magistrate, 
composed novels in v/hich he depicted low life as 



Age of Pope. 



121 



it then existed. Being full of indelicacy, his works, 
though powerful and extraordinary, cannot be read 
in the family circle, and are not popular at the 
present day. Among his writings are, Flays^ Jo- 
seph Andrews, Tom yo7ies, Amelia, and yonathan 
Wild, He has been called the father of the Eng- 
lish novel, by some who consider that Richardson 
did not escape the trammels of the French ro- 
mance. 

William Collins, 1720-1756, was of humble 
origin, but had good educational advantages. His 
life, full of disappointment, dissipation, and unful- 
filled projects, ended in insanity. He died at an 
early age, after producing some of the finest lyrics 
in our language. He was the author of Ode to 
Evening, The Passions, Ode o?i the Superstitions of 
the Highlands, The Dirge ifi Cymbeline, and other 
pieces. 

Samuel Richardson, 1689-1761, the son of a 
cabinet-maker, and of indifferent education, was 
brought up as a printer, and became the originator 
of the novel of high life. In youth he was noted for 
his facility in story-telling, and was a favorite of the 
young girls, for three of whom he wrote their love- 
letters. These circumstances exercised a strong 
influence, and induced him, at the age of fifty, to 
write his first novel, Pamela, or* Virtue Rewarded, 
in the epistolary style. Though comprised in four 



122 



Influence of the People. 



large volumes, this was eagerly read and highly 
praised. It was followed, in 1749, by the history 
of Clarissa Harlowe^ in eight volumes. In 1753 
Richardson published Sir Charles Graftdison, also 
in the form of letters, and in seven volumes. These 
were marked by minute and tedious descriptions 
which, in our age, would cause them to be scarcely 
read at all. Sir Walter Scott says, "It requires a 
reader to be in some degree acquainted with the 
huge folios of inanity over which our ancestors 
yawned themselves to sleep, ere he can estimate 
the delight they must have experienced from this 
unexpected return to truth and nature." Richard- 
son's novels are pictures of the heart, minute and 
truthful, and in this lay their power, and the reason 
for their popularity. 

Allan Ramsay, i 685-1 758, was the son of a 
Scotch miner. His early advantages of education 
were limited. He was apprenticed to a wig-maker 
a' the age of fifteen, but after marriage opened a 
book-seller's shop, and also produced much poetry 
of varied style as well as degrees of merit. His 
masterpiece is the Gentle Shepherd, a pastoral 
drama, in which Scotch country life is depicted in 
all its natural simplicity. By some critics this is 
considered the finest idyllic drama in the world. 
In the title the word gentle signifies well-born or 
noble, a meaning inhering in the word gentleman. 
Being in the northern dialect, the Gentle Shepherd 



Age of Pope. 



123 



was very popular in Scotland, but notwithstanding 
its provincial language, it was republished both in 
London and Dublin. Ramsay wrote many popular 
lyrics, among which the Yellow-haired Laddie^ and 
Lochaber no More are still dear to the hearts of his 
countrymen. 

Lady Montague, i 690-1 762, whose family name 
was Pierrepoint, was the daughter of the Duke of 
Kingston, was highly educated, became the pet of 
the wits of the reign of Queen Anne, and at the 
age of twenty-two married Edward Wortley Mon- 
tague. During two years of the ten that she lived 
with her husband, he was English ambassador at 
Constantinople. Her literary fame rests upon her 
Letters., published after her death. Epistolary com- 
position was much cultivated at this period by AVal- 
pole, Cowper, Pope, and other men who stood high 
in literary circles, but Lady Montague excels them 
all in vivacity, sarcasm, ease, elegance, and the 
other traits that distinguish letters from essays. 
She challenges comparison with Madame de Se- 
vigne, the great letter-writer of the time of Louis 
XIV., who alone is to be mentioned as her equal. 
In the letters of the French lady there is a delicate 
motherly affection that is entirely wanting in the 
English writer. While Lady Montague is deficient 
in delicacy of taste, as well as in other gentle traits, 
she is superior to Madame de Sevigne in intellect- 
ual culture. One is gossipy and brilliant, the other 
vivacious, observing, philosophical. 



124 



Influeiice of the People. 



Laurence Sterne, 1713-1768^ was a graduate 
of Cambridge University, and an eccentric and 
inconsistent clergyman of the Church of England. 
His reputation as an author was established upon 
the publication of Tristram Shandy^ an odd, and 
somewhat immoral novel, with little plot, and con- 
sisting chiefly of slightly connected sketches of hu- 
mor and fancy. In 1768 The Sentimental yourney 
appeared. It contains, among many gems of 
thought and sentiment, a great deal that is impure 
and profane. 

Tobias George Smollett, 1721-1771, was of a 
good family, his grandfather being a member of 
the Scottish parliament. He manifested, at a very 
early age, a tendency to ridicule by his abundant 
satirical verses on his school-fellows. He was ed- 
ucated for the medical profession, but the passion 
for miscellaneous reading, which often besets men 
of genius, diverted his attention from the proper 
direction of his energies. His principal novels are, 
Roderick Random^ Peregrine Pickle^ and Sir Hum- 
phrey Clinker^ the last of which breathes a kind- 
lier spirit, and is livelier than the other two. Smol- 
lett spent much of his life away from his native 
countr}^, where he was cordially entertained, and 
was the recipient of flattering attentions from the 
literati. His novels are original and amusing, the 
characters being numerous, but of very different 
values as representations of life. He appears to 



Age of Pope. 125 



have had no moral purpose, and in this respect is 
much inferior to Richardson, while like other writ- 
ers of the period, he disfigured his pages with 
much that is coarse and disgusting. Smollett is 
also known as the author of A Complete History of 
Eitgland to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, written 
with fluency and fairness. A portion of it is usu- 
ally printed as a continuation of Hume's history. 



Our view of this period of literature will not be 
complete until we depict another character that is 
often referred to by the writers of the time. 

Nor far from Bunhill-Fields, where Bunyan, Watts, 
Owen, Blake, and many other celebrities are interred, 
is a part of the city of London that is peculiar even 
there by reason of its filthy and labyrinthine courts, 
its antique houses, and its depressing air of poverty. 
It and its denizens are mentioned by Pope in his 
Dunciad in these words : — 

Not with less glory mighty Dulness crowned, 
Shall take through Grub Street her triumphant round : 
And, her Parnassus glancing o'er at once, 
Behold a hundred sons, and each a dunce." 

In Grub Street dwelt those who wrote ballads, and 
did hack work for the book-sellers. Their poverty- 
stricken character is described in an imaginary ac- 
count written by Pope and his friends. 

"At a tallow chandler's in Petty-France, half- 



126 



Influence of the People. 



way under the blind arch, ask for the historian ; 
at the Bedstead and Bolster^ a music house in 
Moorfields, two translators in bed together ; at a 
blacksmith's shop in the Friars, a Pindaric writer 
in red stockings j at Mr. Summer's_, a thief-catch- 
er's in Lewkner's Lane, the man that wrote against 
the impiety of Mr. Rowe's plays," etc. 

The low nature of these performances has fixed 
the name of Grub Street upon " bad matter ex- 
pressed in a bad manner, false confused histories, 
low creeping poetry, and grovelling prose," whether 
written in that locality or elsewhere. 

We have generally looked upon the other aspect 
of author life in this chapter, but we must remem- 
ber that, as the proverb tells us, "a medal always 
has two sides." In this era authors were very suc- 
cessful or very miserable, and we can see very lit- 
tle of any intermediate condition. The poor hack 
writers wrote prefaces, prologues, indexes, reviews, 
almanacs, in short anything, receiving, as Macaulay 
says, the w^ages of a ditcher. Some of these, like 
Johnson, struggled manfully through their trials, 
and rose to fame, but they were few; the far 
greater number perished prematurely, worn out 
by the toils of the way, or destroyed by their own 
dissipations. 

As we look over the Age of Pope, we see that 
we have made progress. On our increasing list 
of good books we have recorded the titles of many 
that will never be wiped out. Among these are. 



Age of Popi 



127 



Rohinso7i Crusoe^ Rape of the Lock, the Dunciad, 
Gulliver's Travels, Thomson's Seasons, Watts's 
Hymns, Improvement of the Mind, and Logic, Col- 
Hns's Odes, Richardson's Pamela, Ramsay's Drama 
and Lyrics, Lady Montague's Letters, and others. 





CHAPTER XII. 

MATURE ENGLISH. 

Influence of the People^ 1700-18 70. 

II. THE AGE OF JOHNSON, I745-180O. 

j|HE second division of the period of the 
people's influence extends from 1745 to 
the end of the century. During these 
years the figure that had the greatest prominence 
was that of Samuel Johnson, the author of that 
great national work, the Dictionary of the English 
La7tguage, Lord Macaulay calls Johnson the last 
survivor of a genuine race of Grub Street hacks," 
and in closing an article on the subject in the Edin- 
burgh Review, the same eminent writer presents us 
the following picture of the room of the Literary 
Club of which Dr. Johnson was a member : — 

"The club-room is before us, and the table on 
which stand the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons 
for Johnson. There are the spectacles of Burke, 
and the tall thin form of Langton ; the courtly sneer 
of Beauclerk, and the beaming smile of Garrick ; 
Gibbon tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with 
his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that 



Age of Johnson, 



129 



strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures 
of those among whom we have been brought up, — 
the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with 
the scars of disease ; the brown coat, the black 
worsted stockings, the gray wig with a scorched 
foretop ; the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared 
to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving 
with convulsive twitches ; we see the heavy form 
rolling ; we hear it puffing ; and then comes the 
' Why sir ! ' and the ' What then, sir ? ' the ' No 
sir ! ' and the ' You don't see your way through 
the question, sir ! ' 

" What a singular destiny has been that of this 
remarkable man ! To be regarded in his own age 
as a classic, and in ours as a companion ; to have 
received from his contemporaries that full homage 
which men of genius have in general received only 
from posterity; to be more intimately known to 
posterity than other men are known to their con- 
temporaries ! That kind of fame which is com- 
monly the most transient, is in his case the most 
durable. The reputation of those writings which 
he probably expected to be immortal, is every 
day fading ; while those peculiarities of manner, 
and that careless table-talk, the memory of which 
he probably thought would die with him, are likely 
to be remembered as long as the English language 
is spoken in any quarter of the globe." 

Such was Dr. Johnson, the most influential au- 
thor of his day, who raised himself to his post of 
9 



130 Influence of the People. 

supremacy in the face of obstacles which would 
have deterred a less energetic character from mak- 
ing even an attempt. His own earnestness and 
profundity influenced many who surrounded him. 
The peculiarity of his diction was more easily imi- 
tated by weaker minds, than his deep sense, and 
the style of language called Johnsonese, with little 
to recommend it, obtained a temporary prevalence. 
It was Dr. Johnson's inability to write in plain short 
words, at which his friend Goldsmith aimed when 
he very wittily said, If you were to write a fable 
about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little 
fishes talk like whales.'' 

Literature in our own country was at this time very 
strongly marked by the earnestness and strength 
with which religious and political discussions are 
generally characterized. American literature may 
be considered in three periods. I. The Colonial 
Period^ extending from 1620 to 1775. II. The Rev- 
olutionary Period^ from 1775 1830. III. The 
American Period^ from 1830 to the present time. 

During the Colonial period the great subjects of 
discussion were connected with religion. Among 
the writers of the era were Increase and Cotton 
Mather, Charles Chauncey, Samuel Johnson, of 
Columbia College, Mather Byles, Ezra Stiles, of 
Yale College, Benjamin Franklin, John Bartram, 
Thomas Prince, Thomas Hutchinson, and Jonathan 
Edwards. The last writer is styled by Sir James 
Mackintosh the metaphysician of America, of whose 



Age of yohnson, 131 

power of subtle argument the same high authority 
asserts that it is " perhaps unmatched, certainly un- 
surpassed among men." According to Robert Hall, 
Edwards was the first in any country or age. 

The Revolutionary period is marked by no less 
earnestness, though the topics discussed were of a 
political character. Among the literary men of this 
time were, James Otis, Josiah Quincy, Jr., Timothy 
Pickering, George Washington, Alexander Hamil- 
ton, John Jay, James Madison, John Adams, Fisher 
Ames, Jeremy Belknap, Chief Justice Marshall, 
William Wirt, Alexander Graydon, Samuel Hopkins, 
Timothy Dwight, Joseph Bellamy, Noah Worcester, 
David Rittenhouse, Lindley Murray, Philip Frenau, 
John Trumbull, Joel Barlow, Joseph Hopkinson, 
Joseph Dennie, and Thomas Jefferson. The last 
named was the author of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence^ in which the concise, direct, forcible, dig- 
nified, and eloquent traits of the authorship of the 
period appear to have culminated. The Revolu- 
tionary period, then, was marked by eloquent dis- 
cussions of legal and constitutional principles. 

The last period of American literature will be 
referred to in Chapters XHI. and XIV. 

Jonathan Edwards, 1703-175 8, was the only 
son of a highly educated Connecticut clergyman. 
He was precocious in the development of the rea- 
soning powers, full of imagination and enthusiasm, 
and of remarkable habits of observation and re- 



132 



Influence of the People. 



flection. After graduation at Yale College, he 
studied theology for two years, and before he was 
nineteen years of age was settled over a Calvinistic 
church in New York city. His subsequent life was 
spent as tutor in Yale College, pastor at Northamp- 
ton, Massachusetts, missionary to the Indians at 
Stockbridge, and as president of the college at 
Princeton, New Jersey, where he died a few weeks 
after his inauguration. He was one of the most 
profound thinkers the world has ever seen, and 
studied out in his quiet places of retirement those 
remarkable metaphysical schemes which have ex- 
erted a world-wide influence. As a metaphysician, 
Dr. Chalmers ranks him above all his contempora- 
ries, and Dugald Stewart says he does not yield in 
logical acuteness to any disputant bred in the 
universities of Europe. His chief works are. Free- 
dom of the Will, History of Redemption, True Vir- 
tue, and Original Sin, 

Thomas Gray, 1716-1771, the son of a money- 
broker of London, became, after a course of study 
at Eton and Cambridge, and a tour through France 
and Italy, the greatest of the purely lyric poets of 
England. He lived very quietly at Cambridge, en- 
joying his studies of the classics, of antiquity, and 
of nature. There he cultivated the fashionable 
epistolary composition, in which he excelled, and 
there he produced the lyrics which have given him 
fame as a man of deep learning, careful observation, 



Age of yohnsoft. 



133 



quiet humor, strong sympathy, tenderness, fancy, 
and exquisitely refined taste. He is best known by 
his Elegy written in a Country Church-yard^ which 
is often reprinted in our day. Among his other 
works are. The Progress of Poesy^ The Bard^ Ode 
to Springy Hy7n?z to Adversity^ On a Distant Pros- 
pect of Eto?t, and Letters, all of which display the 
graces of taste and scholarship for which he was 
remarkable. 

Oliver Goldsmith, 1728-17 74, was the son of 
the Protestant rector of Pallas, Ireland. He was 
sent to various schools, and to Trinity College, 
Dublin, but was never a superior scholar. Of gen- 
tle heart, and unable to grapple successfully with 
real life, he at first gained a precarious subsistence 
by writing and selling street ballads. For a year 
he travelled through Flanders, France, Germany, 
Switzerland, and Italy, trudging often all day on 
foot, and playing merry tunes on his flute for his 
supper and bed. A part of this year he was com- 
panion of a rich young man who needed a guide ] 
and in Italy he won some money and food by dis- 
puting in a university with the doctors. The fruit 
of this trip was apparent in The Traveller and in 
the picture of the Philosophic Vagabond, in the Vicar 
of Wakefield. In 1757 he wrote his Chi?iese Letters, 
for the periodicals, and also the Life of Beau Nash, 
and the History of England. He afterwards pro- 
duced the comedies of The Good Natured Man, 



134 



hifiuence of the People, 



and She Stoops to Conquer, These were followed 
by the History of Rome, the History of Greece, the 
History of Animated Nature, and by the poem of 
the Deserted Village, The grace, ease, elegance, 
delicacy, and purity of these writings caused the au- 
thor's society to be courted by the most admired 
wits, authors, and statesmen of the day, in whose 
company we saw him at the Literary Club men- 
tioned in the beginning of this chapter. His life 
was made miserable by his weakness of purpose, 
prodigality, and bad habits ; and his large income, 
sometimes as great as $9,000 a year, did not prove 
sufficient to keep him from leaving heavy debts 
unpaid at his death. 

David Hume, 1711-1776, one of the most dis- 
tinguished Scotchmen of any era, was a metaphy- 
sician and a historian. He was born in Edinburgh, 
the second son of an old family j he was bred to 
the law, which he disliked, and after a variety of 
changes gave himself wholly to literature. His 
first writings, A Treatise of Human Nature, and 
Moral and Philosophical Essays, were only tolera- 
bly successful. He next wrote Political Discourses, 
and Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. 
In 1754, he produced the first volume of the History 
of England, on which his fame rests, of which but 
forty-five copies were sold the first year. Deeply 
chagrined, the author meditated a change of name 
and flight from home. The tide turned in his favor. 



Age of J^ohnson, 



135 



however, and in 1762 he had completed his fourth 
volume in triumph. Picturesque, dramatic, and 
beautiful, his works are still read, though they con- 
tain errors of fact occasioned by his lack of dili- 
gence and research, and errors of doctrine, caused 
by his skeptical religious philosophy. Doubting 
almost everything, he is an unreliable, and often a 
false guide, and must rank second to the conscien- 
tious and careful students who have succeeded him. 

Samuel Johnson, i 709-1 784, from whom this 
period takes its name, was the son of a humble 
bookseller of Lichfield. The premature death of 
his father left him without the means of obtaining 
a complete education, and, after unsuccessful at- 
tempts at gaining a livelihood in other ways, he 
went to London, where for some years he was a 
bookseller's drudge. His pen was continually at 
work writing pamphlets, prefaces, epitaphs, essays, 
and biographical memoirs, many of which were pub- 
lished in the Gentleman'^ s Magaziiie, His poem 
London^ published in 1738, laid the foundation of 
his fame. The next year it was followed by the 
Vanity of Human Wishes, in imitation of one of 
the Satires of Juvenal. His chief prose works are, 
The Rambler, The Idler, Rasselas Prince of Abys- 
sinia, Lives of the Poets, Journey to the Hebrides, 
and the Dictionary of the English Language. The 
last was the product of vast labor, and occupied 
the author eight years. It is deserving of very 



136 



Influence of the People. 



high praise, though necessarily defective in many 
particulars. The illustrative quotations are so in- 
teresting that few open the volume for reference 
without reading much more than the passage they 
looked for. The author's style is marked by the re- 
currence of stately words of Latin origin, by meas- 
ured phrase, and by a lack of simplicity. Though 
the style of Johnson may be admired in his own 
works, it was rendered ridiculous through the ex- 
travagance of his imitators. His life is familiar to 
the world through the inimitable record made by his 
friend and obsequious companion James Boswell. 

Benjamin Franklin, i 706-1 790, the son of a 
tallow-chandler of Boston, Massachusetts, began life 
as a journeyman printer, hoping to obtain thereby 
the advantages of education. By the diligent use 
of his spare time, he improved his mind and style 
of writing. He afterwards pursued his vocation in 
Philadelphia, and in London. In 1729 he became 
publisher of the Fe?i7isylva?zia Gazette, and engaged 
in bookselling. In 1732 he began to publish Poor 
Richard's Almanac^ which was successfully contin- 
ued for nearly a quarter-century. In 1736 he en- 
tered political life, and was thenceforth a prominent 
champion of the Colonies. He was at different 
times Postmaster - general. Minister to France, 
Governor of Pennsylvania^ one of the framers of 
the Federal Constitution, and in short, as Bancroft 
says, "the greatest diplomatist of the eighteenth 



Age of yohnson. 



137 



century." He wrote Scientific Papers y The Way 
to Wealthy Letters^ and an Autobiography^ which last 
has lately been republished by the Hon. John Bige- 
low, late United States Minister in France. Dr. 
Franklin's style is homely, practical, and pointed. 

Adam Smith, 1723-1790, was a Scotchman, well 
educated, first at Glasgow University, and after- 
wards at Oxford, who, adopting the pursuit of letters, 
became professor at Glasgow, and as the result of 
persistent study, produced in 1759 his Theory of the 
Moral Sentiments^ and in 1776, his greater work. 
An Biquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth 
of Nations, The first of these is an eloquent phil- 
osophical discussion, and the second is the work 
which laid the foundation of the modern science of 
political economy. 

William Robertson, i 721-1793, was another 
Scotchman, who until 1759, was only known as an 
eloquent Presbyterian preacher. In that year he 
produced his History of Scotland during the Reigns 
of Qiieen Mary, and of Kiiig James VL, till his 
Accession to the Crown of England, This judicious 
work gave the author a renown as immediate and 
well founded as it was surprising to his contempora- 
ries. Ten years later his History of the Reign of 
Charles V, being equally well received, he derived 
a competence from his publications. In 1777 he 
produced his History of America^ a work contain- 



138 Influence of the People, 



ing parts that are of almost poetic interest. In 
1 79 1 he appeared the last time as an author with 
his Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge 
which the Aiicients had of India, a work of merit, 
but which was based on sources of information that 
were not always reliable. 

Edward Gibbon, 173 7-1 794, was a delicate youth 
of gentle birth, and a diligent student almost from 
infancy. His education was thorough, having been 
pursued both in England and on the Continent. 
In religious views he experienced various changes 
until he became a deist, a fact which must be con- 
sidered while reading his works. His studies were 
pursued in the fields of history with wonderful care 
and great discrimination. He says that while he 
sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol in Rome, 
on the fifteenth of October, 1764, while the bare- 
footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of 
Jupiter, the idea of writing the decline and fall of 
that city first started to his mind. Twenty-three 
years later he laid down his pen in his summer- 
house at Lausanne, Switzerland, having completed 
the greatest historical work in the language. The 
title is the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 
and the history begins with the reign of Trajan, 
A. D. 98, and closes with the capture of Constan- 
tinople by the Turks in 1453. It has been said 
that everything except Christianity is embellished 
by Gibbon's pen. Lord Byron wrote of him that 
he — 



Age of yohnson. 



139 



" , . . . Shaped his weapon with an edge severe, 
Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer ; " 

lines which show Byron's estimate of the attitude 
which Gibbon assumed toward the Christian faith. 
His style is pompous^ ornate, and lacking generous 
enthusiasm. While we give him all the literary credit 
he deserves, it may well be added that the highest 
productions of literature have never been the fruit 
of infidelity ; the clearest, strongest, and most bra- 
cing thought having always been closely allied to a 
strong faith in the revelations of Scripture. Gibbon 
was a member of Parliament during eight sessions 
at the time of our Revolutionary War, and supported 
Lord North in his efforts to coerce the Americans. 

Robert Burns, i 759-1 796, called the Shake- 
speare of Scotland, was a man of slight education, 
— but it was the education of the heart, based upon 
the Bible, — who owed his general knowledge to 
the Spectator^ the works of Pope and Ramsay, and 
the ballads of his country. Burns first appeared as 
a poet in 1786, and immediately attained an influ- 
ence and popularity greater than any other Scottish 
poet has reached. Like Cowper in England, he 
worked to bring poetry back to truth and nature. 
His convivial habits proved his ruin. In spite of 
his many good traits of mind and heart, Burns pre- 
sents in his life a mournful exhibition of admirable 
simplicity and manly genius, rising to charm the 
world, only to be lost in the drunkard's early grave. 



140 



Influence of the People. 



When yet a plowman, he wrote lines to a Mountain 
Daisy, and the Mousie's Nest, which are full of 
tender beauty. His love poems are well known. 
Among them Ae Fond Kiss and then We Sever, is 
celebrated. His Scots wha hae wi Wallace bled, 
is a powerful patriotic lyric ; the Cotter's Saturday 
Night is a lovely picture of domestic religion, in 
which the poet's father and the old family Bible are 
interesting features, Tam O' Shanter is a weird tale 
of a market-day carousal, a midnight ride, a witch 
dance in the Alloway kirk, with other incidents ; 
and his other poems possess the same traits which 
endear them to the Scottish heart, notwithstanding 
some coarseness and occasional flings at religion, 
the purity of which necessarily condemned his pri- 
vate life. 

Edmund Burke, i 730-1 797, holds the first place 
among the orators and political writers of England. 
A native of Dublin, he inherited many good Irish 
traits, and spent many of his early days in the 
county of Cork, not far from the river Mulla, and 
the ruins of Castle Kilcolman, where in the days of 
Elizabeth, Edmund Spenser lived and wrote. At 
the age of twenty Burke went to London, and 
began to write for his daily bread, his first produc- 
tions being A Vindication of Natural Society, The 
Sublime and Beautiful, an American History, in two 
volumes, and The Annual Register, published by 
Dodsley. These brought the young author to the 



Johnson, ' 141 



notice of Dr. Johnson and the other eminent men of 
the day. In 1766 he entered Parliament, and be- 
came prominent as an opponent of the American 
war, a subject that furnished the theme of many of 
his most eloquent efforts. In 1788 he delivered his 
grandest speech, on the occasion of the Impeach- 
ment of Warre7i Hastings^ Governor-general of 
India. In 1790 he warned England against the 
dangers that were threatening France, in his Reflec- 
tions on the French Revolution, In this occurs the 
spirited account of Marie Antoinette, and the age 
of chivalry, found in many of our text-books. 
Burke's last works were. Letters on a Regicide Peace^ 
Letter to a Noble Lord, and Observations on the 
Conduct of the Minority. 

William Cowper, i 731-1800, one of the most 
delicate, free, and idiomatic of English poets, was 
unfortunately the victim of religious melancholy 
which deepened into insanity. From this state of 
mind he had several recoveries. Between 1776 and 
1794, Cowper was only deranged for six months, 
and it was during this period that his principal 
works were produced. These are. The Task, Hymns, 
Translation of Ho77ier, John Gilpifi, and Lines to 
7ny Mother's Picture, Possessed of an elevated 
genius, and of a desire to make mankind better by 
writing, Cowper's poetry is of a healthy tone, is un- 
affected and highly esteemed. The wit exhibited 
in the writings of many of those whose unregulated 



142 



Influence of the People, 



lives we have been considering, is much of it lost 
to the world on account of the offensive setting, in 
which a debased taste displayed it, but the simple 
faith of Cowper lives in his hymns, and will always 
exert a powerful influence. Southey calls Cowper 
the best of English letter-writers, which is high 
praise, but not undeserved. His hymns are among 
the best and most frequently used of any in the 
language. 

Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817, a native of North- 
ampton and a grandson of Jonathan Edwards, was 
thoroughly educated, and became in 1795 president 
of Yale College, in which he had been a student. 
Among his principal writings are, The History^ Elo- 
quence^ and Foetry of the Bible, Greenfield Hill, a 
poem in seven parts j a version of Watts' s Fsalms, 
Travels in New England and New York, and The- 
ology Explai7ied a7id Defended in a Series of Sermons, 
in five volumes. These are full of sentiments of 
religion and patriotism. The last mentioned, his 
System of Theology, is a standard work in America 
and England, and upon it his reputation as an 
author mainly depends. His reputation as president 
of Yale College has caused his memory to be re- 
vered by many who came under his influence there, 
and by all who are interested in the prosperity of 
that important institution. Dr. Dwight's popular- 
ity with the students was unbounded, and he intro- 
duced reforms in the college management which 
have had a permanent influence. 



Age of yohnson. 



143 



Our book-shelves are filling up. The period just 
considered has given us Dr. Johnson's wonderful 
Dictionary^ and by its side stand the volumes of his 
Rambler and Idler^ with their weighty essays, while 
not far off is the book he wrote to pay his mother's 
funeral expenses, — Rasselas^ Prince of Abyssinia, 
On another shelf we read the names of Hume and 
Gibbon, and Robertson on our new but substan- 
tial histories. There too are Burke's complete 
works, and Franklin's, and Smith's Wealth of Na- 
tions^ and Edwards on the Will^ and on Original 
Sin^ which were worked out under the elms at 
Stockbridge. Another shelf show^s us Cowper's 
Task^ Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield^ and Deserted 
Village^ and Gray's Elegy written in a Country 
Church-yard. Surely the age of Johnson has not 
left us without marks of its earnestness and depth, 
if it does include the sweet lyrics of Burns and 
Gray, and the descriptive verse of Cowper and 
Goldsmith j 



CHAPTER XIII. 



MATURE ENGLISH. 

Influence of the People^ 1 700-1870. 

III. AGE OF POETICAL ROMANCE, 180O-183O. 



Hp 



i]N the period we have just considered, there 
was a notable change in the poetry of our 
literature. Pope and Dryden had passed 
away, and their successors, Goldsmith, Cowper, and 
Gray, had turned from classical subjects to more 
romantic themes. 

Let us pause for a moment to consider the in- 
fluences that effected this result. 

A complete investigation of the subject would 
lead us to a very interesting discussion of the in- 
ternational relations of literature, for the same 
change, in its essential traits, has been noticed also 
in both Germany and France. In the latter coun- 
try it has been ascribed to German and English 
influence, and the change in England has been 
attributed to the influence of France and Ger- 
many. 

In Germany a national literature was rapidly de- 
veloping, and on the lists of authors and thinkers 



Age of Poetical Romance, 145 

there we find the names of Lessing, Burger, Wie- 
land, Klopstock^ Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Fichte, 
and Jacobi. 

In France, during the Reign of Terror, from the 
destruction of the Bastile in 1789 to the execution 
of Robespierre in 1794, and the Italian campaign 
of Napoleon in 1796, while the nation was convulsed 
in a blind struggle after liberty, a romantic school 
was inaugurated in literature. 

It is certain that in each of the three nations 
mentioned there was a spontaneous and simulta- 
neous forsaking of the classical for the romantic 
style, not only among poets, but also among prose 
writers. 

The diffusion of knowledge, the progress of re- 
publican ideas, and the more liberal views held 
both by the scholar and the churchman, had al- 
ready begun to impress the age ; and the lighter 
literature which has since been so remarkably de- 
veloped, was well adapted to furnish relief and 
recreation in the more intense life of modern times. 

We are now prepared to consider those writers, 
who, after Dr. Johnson and his friends had left the 
stage, introduced, and for a generation continued to 
produce, what now constitutes our treasures of 
poetical romance. 

The period was one of intense conflicts, of much 
passionate emotion, and the expression of writers 
was to so great an extent found in song, that no era 
presents us such an array of poets. 
10 



146 



Influence of the People. 



In 1765, Thomas Percy, a bishop of the English 
Established Church, gave a powerful impetus to 
this tendency by the publication of his Reliques of 
English Poetry, which consisted of heroic ballads, 
songs, and metrical tales connected with early Eng- 
lish literature, accompanied by a dissertation on our 
ancient bards and minstrelsy. 

In 1796, Sir Walter Scott began his brilliant 
career by publishing a translation of Biirger's Le- 
nore, which was followed by his other stirring poems. 
The rising splendor of Lord Byron turned Scott's 
pen from poetry to the field of prose romance, in 
which he had no dangerous competitor. 

In 1798, William Wordsworth and his sister took 
up their abode among the charming . lakes and 
mountains which render the counties of Cumber- 
land and Westmoreland so attractive to tourists. 
In 1800, Wordsworth published a nev/ edition of a 
volume of his Ballads that had previously been 
neglected. His endeavor was to turn the public 
taste from pomposity to simplicity, from a devotion 
to antiquity to the love of nature and humanity. 
In these efforts he was supported by Southey^ Cole- 
ridge, De Quincey, Wilson, and others, to whom 
the sobriquet Lake School was applied, as if they 
had founded a poetical sect upon a new theory of 
composition. As we consider the authors generally 
included in this school, we shall find that though 
they sympathized in many points, there were also 
important differences in their style and sentiments. 



Age of Poetical Romance. 147 

Soon after the opening of the present century, 
the writers of America began to exhibit tokens of 
increased capacity and greater cuhivation, and to 
develop a national literature. The present genera- 
tion has seen the shackles of imitation drop off one 
by one, and the freedom of originality is growing 
more marked. Thus, in moral and political science, 
in law, in fiction, and history, in oratory, in humor- 
ous, sentimental, and thoughtful writings, the range 
of American thought has been vast, and our authors 
have been acknowledged by the constant reproduc- 
tion of their works in all civilized countries. The 
increasing number of good writers in the United 
States as well as in Great Britain, will make it 
necessary to exclude from our notice many who in 
a larger work would demand no small attention. 

Thomas Percy, 1728-1811, the son of a Shrop- 
shire grocer, was educated at Oxford, entered the 
Church, and became Lord Bishop of Dromore, in 
Ireland. He very appropriately receives our notice 
by virtue of his Reliques of EfigUsh Poetry^ first 
published in 1765, and again with additions in 1794, 
the important influence of which has been already 
mentioned. Percy investigated the riches of our 
ballad literature, and reproduced the works of the 
bards and minstrels, of whom he wrote that they 
" were greatly respected by our ancestors, and con- 
tributed to soften the roughness of a martial and un- 
lettered people by their songs and by their music." 



148 htfluence of the People, 



These ballads are written in a style of great sim- 
plicity, and, after Bishop Percy had proclaimed their 
merits, received much attention from Goldsmith, 
Johnson, Cowper, Wordsworth, Scott, Southey, and 
Coleridge. In No. 70 of the Spectator^ Addison 
had long before expressed his interest in the 
songs of the common people, and other writers 
had praised them, but it was left for Percy to bring 
their great charms before the world in such a 
form, that all succeeding poets, even down to Ten- 
nyson, have been obliged to own their influence. 
Percy's works include The Legend of King Arthur^ 
St, George and the Dragon^ Chevy Chase, John 
Anderson my Jo, Lilli Burlero, Leir, and others 
illustrating Shakespeare ; and the Hermit of Wark- 
worth, the last being, however, the bishop's own 
composition. These ballads opened a fresh foun- 
tain of poetry, and among other effects, they gave 
the first impulse to the genius of Sir Walter Scott. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, i 792-1822, was of 
wealthy parentage, studious habits, but of irregular 
education, having been expelled from Oxford at the 
age of nineteen for a defense of atheism. His 
rich genius and enthusiastic nature were poisoned 
by the infidelity of Voltaire, and his poems are full 
of audacious skepticism, and abominable pictures 
in which religion is decried, and marriage is ar- 
bitrarily made productive only of misery. His chief 
productions are, Queen Mab, Alastor, or the Spirit 



Age of Poetical Romance, 149 



of Solitude^ Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unhoujid^ 
The Cenci, Rosalind and Hele7i, and minor poems. 
Among the last is the Ode to a Skylark, which is 
full of simplicity and beauty, and in which Words- 
worth declared Shelley's genius culminated. Dr. 
Craik says that " the highest poetical genius of this 
time, if it was not that of Coleridge, was, probably, 
that of Shelley. So much poetry, so rich in vari- 
ous beauty, was probably never poured forth with 
so rapid a flow from any other mind." Of Shelley's 
Epipsychidion, written the last year of his life, the 
same critic asserts that it may be considered, " for 
its wealth and fusion of all the highest things — of 
imagination, of expression, of music — one of the 
greatest miracles ever wrought in poetry." Many 
of his writings are, however, disfigured by monstrous 
and hideous pictures for which his remarkable 
genius cannot atone. 

Lord Byron, i 788-1 824, was a congenial friend 
of the last named poet. He was the profligate son 
of an unprincipled father who abandoned his wife 
and child, and died soon after on the Continent. 
This abandoned child, George Gordon, became by 
the death of his grand-uncle. Lord Byron, and the 
owner of Newstead Abbey, in the midst of what had 
been Sherwood Forest. Inheriting from his mother 
a passionate and uncontrolled temper, and being 
of an eccentric and misanthropic character. Lord 
Byron became noted for irregularities of conduct, 



150 Infltcence of the People, 



contempt for restraint, the companionship of tal- 
ented skeptics, and for an oriental voluptuousness 
of imagination. He began authorship by publish- 
ing Hours of Idle7iesSy which was severely criticised 
by the Edinburgh Review^ in an article supposed 
to have been written by Lord Brougham. Byron 
retaliated with a satire of indiscriminate abuse, en- 
titled English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. His 
next work was Childe Harold^ s Pilgrimage^ written 
after a tour on the Continent. This work, which 
contains many poetic descriptions of the scenes 
through which the author passed, made Lord Byron 
the idol of London, where he resided for the three 
succeeding years. In 18 14 he produced the Giaour^ 
the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair, and Lara. These 
were followed by the Siege of Corinth, and Parisiana^ 
after the production of which, having separated from 
his young wife, the author left England in 18 16 
never to return, followed by the abuse of the jour- 
nals and the hisses of the people. He afterwards 
wrote the Prisoner of Chilian, Manfred, a tragedy, 
and Don Juan. The last is a humorous, licentious, 
flippant, and incomplete poem, which shows great 
command of versification. One of the peculiarities 
of Byron's poems is that the heroes are impersona- 
tions of himself, and possess his contradictory traits. 
His productions exerted a dangerous influence, es- 
pecially upon the young and enthusiastic. They 
were losing their popularity, when, in 1869, attention 
was temporarily attracted to them by publications of 



Age of Poetical Romance, 151 

the Countess Guiccioli, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, 
and other writers. 

George Crabbe, 1754-1832, an original, con- 
scientious, matter-of-fact poet, was the son of a rev- 
enue officer of Suffolk. By the friendship of Burke, 
he was encouraged in his early efforts, and placed in 
a position of ease as a country clergyman. He was 
a minute student of real life, of which he produced 
the traits in his poems, with an unsparing pre-Raph- 
aelism. Byron called him " Nature's sternest 
painter, yet the best." Under Burke's advice he 
published The Library^ in 1781, which brought him 
many friends, and considerable renown. In 1783 
the Village appeared. This poem had been revised 
by Dr. Johnson, and by it the author's fame was 
insured. Among his other works are, The News- 
paper^ The Parish Register^ The Borough^ and Tales 
of the HalL These exhibit true pictures of Eng- 
lish life, and are of a high moral tone. 

Jeremy Bentham, 1748-183 2, was the son of 
wealthy parents, who taught him to consider himself 
a prodigy. He was graduated at Oxford at sixteen, 
being the youngest who had ever taken a degree 
there. Becoming a writer on law and morals, he 
adopted the idea of Dr. Priestly, of " the greatest 
good to the greatest number," and founded the utili- 
tarian school of writers on jurisprudence. He was 
a friend of John Quincy Adams, our minister at 



152 



Influence of the People. 



London, upon whom, as well as upon many other 
eminent men, his views made a deep impression. 
His chief works are, Letters on Usury ^ Principles of 
Morals and Politics^ Theory of Punishments and 
Rewards^ Public Instruction^ and Book of Fallacies. 
Notwithstanding the arrogance and assurance of 
Bentham's character, and the radical defects of his 
theories, he has exerted considerable influence in 
promoting the modern improvements in legislation. 

Sir Walter Scott, 1771-1832, who was born of 
respectable parents, and raised to the baronetcy on 
account of his writings, wrote both in the spirit of 
the period we are considering, and in that of the next. 
Beginning his long career of authorship with poetry 
of the most charming and romantic description, he 
closed it with the most remarkable series of prose 
romances that ever came from the hand of one man. 
He attended school at Edinburgh, but was not re- 
markable as a scholar. Throughout life Scott's read- 
ing was exceedingly general, but his favorite authors 
were Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Boccacio, Frois- 
sart, and Bishop Percy. The Reliques of the last 
author inspired him in youth with the enthusiastic 
love of ballads which led to the production of the 
Border Minstrelsy, The ballads in this collection 
were partly original, but chiefly gathered in southern 
Scotland. Before the publication of the Border 
Mijistrelsy^ Scott had made some translations from 
the then fashionable German poets. The Lay of 



Age of Poetical Romance, 153 

the Last Minstrel followed in 1805, and at later 
periods, Marmion, the Lady of the Lake^ Don Rod- 
erick^ Rokeby, and the Lord of the Lsles, In 1814, 
Scott published Waverley, a novel that was imme- 
diately successful, and was followed by a series 
produced during the next seventeen years. Of the 
twenty-seven novels in the Waverley series, twenty 
are historical, being founded upon events ranging 
from the eleventh to the eighteenth century. Coimt 
Robert of Paris treats of the time of the first cru- 
sade j The Betrothed, The Talis7nan, and Lvajihoe^ 
belong to the twelfth century ; The Fair Maid of 
Perth belongs to the fourteenth century ; Quentin 
Diirward, and Anne of Gierstein, are founded on 
French history of the fifteenth century; The Monas- 
tery, The Abbot, and Ke7iilworth, relate to the six- 
teenth century ; the two former to Scotland, and 
the last to the court of Elizabeth. Five belong to 
the era of the seventeenth century : The Fortimes 
of Nigel, displaying London life, The Legend of 
Mojitrose, introducing Gustavus Adolphus, and the 
Thirty Years' War, Woodstock and Peveril of the 
Peak, relating to the times of the Cavaliers and 
Roundheads, and Old Mortality, which brings Claver- 
house, and the Covenanters before us. Four belong 
to the eighteenth century : Rob Roy, which transports 
us to the charming Highland lakes, The Lleart of 
Mid-Lothian, in which we find ourselves in Dun Edin 
at the time of the Porteus Mob, in the days of George 
II., and Waverley and Redgauntlet, This cursory 



154 



Influence of the People. 



review of a portion of the literary productions of 
Sir Walter Scott impresses us with a sense of his 
great diligence. Let us add to the works enumer- 
ated his Life of Napoleon^ the Life and Works of 
Dry den ^ in eighteen volumes, the Life and Works of 
Dean Swiff, in nine volumes, the Tales of a Grand- 
father, and novels not mentioned, and we are better 
able to estimate his immense labors as well as the 
grasp of his prolific genius. Scott expended a 
quarter of a million dollars on his beautiful home at 
Abbotsford, and when, at the age of fifty-five, he 
found himself involved in debts amounting to over 
half a million dollars, he set himself at work and 
paid the whole sum, actually dying in the effort 
His works are familiar. They belong to the ob- 
jective school, and are among the finest productions 
of the class. By his later works, Scott laid the 
foundation of the modern historical novel, and was 
followed by hosts of feeble writers. His works 
may be compared with the dramas of Shakespeare, 
in their variety of original characters, the historical 
situations, and adventures, though the dramatist, 
using the subjective style, displays an insight of the 
heart and motives which the novelist has by no 
means equaled. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834, was the 
son of a Devonshire clergyman. He received his 
education chiefly at Christ's Hospital, better known 
as the Blue Coat School, where he began a life-long 



Age of Poetical Romance* ' 155 

intimacy with Charles Lamb, one of his school- 
fellows. Lamb called Coleridge, " The inspired 
charity boy, to whom the casual passer through the 
cloisters listened entranced with admiration as he 
unfolded with deep and sweet intonations, the mys- 
teries of lamblichus or Plotinus, or recited the 
Greek of Homer or Pindar." Beginning life as a 
Unitarian preacher and a visionary republican, he 
finally became both a royalist and a believer in the 
Trinity. His life and writings exhibit the influence 
of the speculative philosophy of Kant, Schelling, 
and Jacobi^ as well as of the poetic art of Goethe 
and Schiller, names which represent the revival 
of German hterature. Professor Shedd, in an 
edition of Coleridge's works published in New 
York in 1853, has contributed much to give a clear 
view of this author's real character. The distress- 
ing habit of opium-eating became his master, and 
caused his sun to go down in a cloud that for a 
score of years had hung over him. Coleridge was 
wonderful as a conversationist, a singularly rare 
accomplishment in his day. He is known as the 
author of Christabel^ Genevieve^ the Rime of the Aii- 
cient Mari?ier, Ode to Mont Blanc, Lectures on 
Shakespeare, the Statesman^ s Manual, and Aids to 
Reflection, Coleridge belonged to the Lake School. 
His works are all fragmentary, but he is admired as 
a critic, poet, philosopher, and divine. 

Charles Lamb, i 775-1834, was a nervous and 



156 



Iiijiuence of the People, 



thoughtful boy, the son of a Londoner of humble 
circumstances, and after receiving his education in 
the Blue Coat School, became a clerk in the office 
of the East India Company. After standing be- 
hind the desk of the accountant thirty-three years, 
Lamb was retired on a pension. He never married, 
but devoted himself, with a noble spirit of self-sacri- 
fice, to the care of an insane sister. His favorite 
books were the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, 
Massinger, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, 
Thomas Fuller, and others of the old school. 
Lamb's works are marked by a gentle humor, and 
are full of quaint fancies, and original thoughts. He 
is chiefly known as the author of the Essays of Elia, 
originally printed in the London Magazine, 

Thomas Arnold, 1795-1842, the distinguished 
master of Rugby School, was a native of the Isle 
of Wight, and a graduate of Oxford University. 
His chief reputation is as a teacher, but he is de- 
servedly admired also as a historian, theologian, 
critic, and Christian scholar. Among his writings 
are, Lectures on Modern History^ the History of 
Eo7ne, the Later Roman Commonwealth^ and some 
influential works on theology. Dr. Arnold's works 
are characterized by catholicity, varied scholarship, 
and discriminative taste. 

Robert Southey, i 774-1843, was of humble 
origin, but of fair education, and became one of the 



Age of Poetical Romance. 157 



most voluminous writers in the language. Beside 
many minor works, he published one hundred and 
nine volumes under his own name. He was a 
brother-in-law of Coleridge, and passed through the 
same changes of political views and religious doc- 
trine. He resided at Keswick, among the Cumber- 
land lakes, and is classed with the Lake poets, 
though lacking their simplicity and originality. He 
was exemplary in all the relations of life, and me- 
thodical in his literary labors. His numerous works 
are the result of vast research, and exhibit wide 
reading. Southey wrote both in prose and verse, 
and among his productions are, yoan of Arc^ an 
epic poem, Wat Tyler^ Thalaha^ Madoc^ The Curse 
of Kehama^ Roderick the Last of the Goths ^ The 
Vision of Judgment^ Life of Nelson^ Colloquies 07t 
Society^ The Doctor^ and History of the Reni?isular 
War. 

Thomas Campbell, i 777-1844, was the son of 
a Scottish merchant, and was educated at the Uni- 
versity of Glasgow. He is known as the author of 
Pleasures of Llope, LLoheiilinden^ Ye Mariners of 
Engla7id^ Gertrude of Wyoming^ The Last Man, Lord 
UllirCs Daughter, and a variety of prose works. 
His poems were highly esteemed by Sir Walter 
Scott, and bear the marks of taste, refinement, pure 
moral sentiment, sublimity, and enthusiasm. 

Thomas Hood, i 798-1845, deserves mention as 



158 Influence of the People, 

the greatest wit and humorist of his age. He was 
a native of London, and the son of a book-seller. 
His writings in prose and verse are of pure morals, 
and generally have a philanthropic or humane de- 
sign. Hood's first work was Whims and Oddities^ 
which made him popular at once. Subsequently he 
produced the Bridge of Sighs, Eugene Aram, the 
Song of the Shirt, and many other compositions of 
great popularity and geniality. 

Sydney Smith, 1771-1845, the first editor of 
the Edinburgh Review, was an English divine, and 
the son of a gentleman of eccentric habits. He 
took his degree of B. A. at Oxford in 1792. Possess- 
ing the humor and some other of the traits of Dean 
Swift, Sydney Smith has exercised a good temper, 
which is in contrast with the cynicism of the former 
writer, and which has endeared him to his readers. 
In addition to his contributions to the Review, Smith 
published Letters on the Subject of the Catholics, 
which are full of drollery; Letters to Archdeacon 
Singleton, and Letters on the Pennsylvania Bonds, 
He had been a eulogist of America, but in the last 
mentioned letters he used his humor and power of 
invective in exhibiting the subject of repudiation in 
the light under which it appeared to him, a holder 
of some of the bonds referred to. There is a levity 
and wordliness in Smith's writings hardly becoming 
a clergyman, though his life appears to have been 
pure, and his acts correct, and he is by no means 
so offensive as Dean Swift. 



Age of Poetical Romance, 159 



Edgar Allan Poe, 1811-1849, was the dis- 
sipated son of an actor and actress, who both died, 
leaving him an orphan at the age of four years. 
Edgar was then adopted and educated by a wealthy 
merchant of Baltimore, Maryland. He is best known 
as the author of the Raven, a poem of weird horror ; 
and by his vigorous, quaint, melodramatic, and som- 
bre tales and sketches. Annabel Lee, is a poetical 
lament over his dead wife, and is esteemed one of 
the sweetest lyrics in the language. 

William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, was born 
and lived among the beauties of those romantic 
lakes of northwestern England, of which we have 
already spoken. He delighted to contemplate every 
change in the varying beauties of nature, and to 
express his passionate love in simple words. The 
opinions of the highest critics were at first unfavor- 
able to the style of the Lake School, but Sir Walter 
Scott and the poet Rogers gave their approval. 
After passing through several stages of criticism the 
efforts of Wordsworth are now appreciated, and his 
faults are recognized as the natural concomitants 
of such a reform as he labored for. Among 
Wordsworth's works are. The Excursion, The White 
Doe of Rylstone, Ruth, We are Seven, Lines on Re- 
visiting the Wye, Peter Bell, and Lyrical Ballads, 
Archbishop Trench regards his Lines suggested by 
a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, as the highest 
expression of his genius. 



i6o Influence of the People, 

Daniel Webster, 1782-1852, the greatest Amer- 
ican statesman, was born among the granite hills of 
New Hampshire. He was educated in the common 
school, at Exeter Academy, and Dartmouth Col- 
lege. Beginning to practice law, and becoming a 
Federalist in politics, he soon rose to eminence, and 
was sent to represent his native State in the federal 
House of Representatives. He was afterwards for 
many years a prominent member of the United 
States Senate, and at last became Secretary of State. 
As an orator he was vigorous, manly, and eloquent 
As a writer he has been said to have united in 
his productions perspicuity, beauty, precision, and 
strength. His works have been published in six 
volumes, with a life by Edward Everett. Among 
his orations are those entitled The Principal Max- 
ims of Washington's Administration^ The First Settle- 
ment of New England^ Discourse i7i Commemoration 
of Jefferson and Adams, Reply to Hayne, Address 
on laying the Corner Stone of Bunker Hill Monument, 
and others. His is another of the great minds which 
have found strength and nourishment in the books 
of the Bible. 

Thomas Moore, i 799-1852, was a native of 
Dublin, of Roman Catholic parentage, and of 
classical education. He was a constant frequenter 
of the gayest society of London, and an intimate 
friend of Lord Byron. After enjoying some govern- 
mental patronage, which gave him an opportunity 



Age of Poetical Romance, i6l 



to visit America, and finally involved him in pecun- 
iary disaster, he devoted himself to literature as a 
profession. Among his best known works are, Lalla 
Rookh, a series of Oriental tales in verse ; Irish Mel- 
odies^ the Loves of the Angels^ and the Life of Byro7i, 
Moore has the reputation of a devoted husband, lov- 
ing father, affectionate son, and firm friend, though 
his writings are superficial and not of a high moral 
tone. Lord Jeffrey very pithily calls him " the most 
licentious of modern versifiers, and the most poet 
ical of the propagators of immorality/' 

Samuel Rogers, 1763-1855, produced poems 
during the entire period now under consideration. 
He was the son of a banker, to which business he 
was himself bred, and in which he accumulated 
wealth. His home in St. James Park, London, was 
a constant resort for many famous men and women, 
among whom were Fox, Erskine, Grattan, Sheridan, 
Mackintosh, Wellington, Byron, Moore, Campbell, 
Scott, Irving, Wordsworth, Sydney Smith, Madame 
de Stael, and others, Rogers was himself carefully 
educated, and his poems are marked by refine- 
ment rather than force. He delighted to befriend 
struggling merit, and to indulge his genial charity. 
His chief works are. Pleasures of Memory^ Human 
Life, Columbus, and Italy, 



A review of this period reveals a richness in 
works of a poetical and romantic nature, and a unity 
II 



l62 



Influe7tce of the People. 



of character among the writers, not found in any 
other age. Thomas Percy, who heads the list, did 
not die until Samuel Rogers, who closes it, was 
forty-five years old, and to a great extent the whole 
group of authors was contemporary. It is possible 
that with the exception of Poe they should all have 
met at different times at the hospitable board of the 
poet Rogers. 

We can readily imagine the enthusiastic Percy 
hailing with pleasure the budding of poetic genius 
as it appeared in Shelley, Byron, Crabbe, Scott, 
Coleridge, Southey, Campbell, Hood, Wordsworth, 
and Rogers, and rejoicing in the elegant prose and 
romance of Bentham and Scott j and \t is no stretch 
of the imagination when we figure to ourselves the 
dignified orator of the Occident entertained by 
the Nestor of St. James Park, or think of any of the 
kindred spirits we have mentioned, receiving from 
the same patron encouragement and sympathy in 
those times of doubt or darkness, when fellow- 
feeling is just the thing to be prized. Nor can we 
forget the blessedness of giving that a poet of such 
wealth experiences in unostentatiously and delicately 
helping his less favored fellows. 

Let us look again at some of the accumulations 
of the period. We are bewildered by the view as 
the fanciful EUa hands us his quaint Essays from 
the dingy East India House ; as the banker-poet 
presents us his richly adorned volumes from St. 
James Park; as the historian of the early ballads 



Age of Poetical Romance, 163 



calls to us from the home of the Percys to admire 
the story of King Cophetua who loved the beggar 
maid ; as the historical romances of Scott turn our 
thoughts to his turreted home at Abbotsford ; as 
the titled proprietor of Newstead Abbey tells us 
the story of Childe Harold ; as the wild, poetic 
notes of Shelley's muse mingle with the pure nature- 
tones of the simple Wordsworth in the breezes from 
the lakes; as the venerable rector of Trowbridge 
repeats, with his characteristic minuteness, the story 
of sweet Phoebe Dawson as she tripped so gayly over 
the village green ! 

The romance and the poetry of this age verily 
drew their inspiration from varied sources, and were 
moulded amid varied scenes. It is a pleasure as 
we mark their development, to reflect that so much 
is pure and of good report. The hand of Time is 
drawn over the dark blots in the picture, and they 
grow less and less distinct, while we see more and 
more of the transcendent beauties which mark the 
development of the poetic element in our loved 
literature ! 



CHAPTER XIV. 



MATURE ENGLISH.. 

Influence of the People^ 1 700-1870. 

IV. AGE OF PROSE ROMANCE, 183O-187O. 




jjN the twenty-sixth of June, 1830, there 
died in England one of whom the late 
Duke of Wellington wrote, " He was in- 
deed the most extraordinary compound of talent, wit, 
buffoonery, obstinacy, and good feeling — in short, 
a medley of the most opposite qualities, with a 
great preponderance of good - — that I ever saw in 
any character in my life." Such was George IV., 
judged by one only seven years his junior, who had 
long been acquainted with his character. 

One month later the city of Paris was shaken 
to its centre. It was Monday morning, the twenty- 
sixth of July, that the populace in the French cap- 
ital began to cry " Down with the Ministers 1 " On 
Tuesday the cry in the streets was louder and 
bolder. " Up with Liberty ! Down with the 
Bourbons ! " was distinctly heard, and M. Guizot 
recorded that there was " a revolutionary and un- 
chained insurrection." On Wednesday Paris was 



Age of Prose Romance. 165 

declared in a state of siege ; the Rue St. Antoine 
was barricaded ; there was a desperate fight about 
the Hotel de Ville ; the street lamps were put out 
at night ; no mail nor diligence was permitted to 
leave the city ; several hundred men lay dead in 
the streets ; and ifi the midst of the commotion, 
the King of France, Charles X., passed the evening 
playing cards in his palace. Thursday came, and 
the working-men, who had borne the brunt of the 
battle the day before, found their ranks increased 
by many of the National Guard, young students, 
and some deputies. Six thousand barricades had 
been formed in the thoroughfares, of planks, carts, 
paving-stones, furniture, and even piano-fortes. 
Everywhere battle raged. During the day the 
Louvre and the Tuileries were captured. Charles 
X. was informed that the royal family had ceased 
to reign, and he hastily left Paris. On Friday, July 
30, the administration was offered to Louis Philippe, 
Duke of Orleans, was accepted, and order was 
restored. The tricolor waved from every building, 
and the Bourbons were expelled from France. 

If we could have looked upon the Parliament of 
Great Britain just before and just after the death 
of King George IV., we should have heard much 
excited debate about reform. For nearly half a 
century there had been debate of the same kind — 
since the days of Pitt, in fact ; and a year after the 
last of the Georges left the world, a reform bill, 
proposed by Lord John Russell, was actually passed. 



1 66 Influence of the People. 

The Tories, who strove to curb the power of the 
people, gave way to the Whigs, who strove to curb 
the power of the crown. 

In 1825 a railway was begun between Liverpool 
and Manchester, and in 1830 a steam locomotive 
was first used upon it. In the summer of the same 
year the first American steam locomotive, which 
had been made under the direction of Horatio 
Allen in West Street, New York, was placed upon 
the rails. Since that date the whole continent has 
echoed the whistle of the locomotive, and railways 
have spread throughout the civilized world. Since 
that date, too, the electric telegraph, from feeble 
beginnings, has advanced, until to-day the most 
popular literature is that which brings to our door 
the daily news of all quarters of the globe, as the 
joint fruit of the printing-press, the electric-tele- 
graph, and the steam locomotive. 

We have had occasion to notice the intimate rela- 
tions which have existed between Italy, France, Ger- 
many, England, and our own country, in the influ- 
ences which each nation has exerted at one time and 
another upon the others of the group. The Italian 
Revival of Letters of the fifteenth century had an 
influence upon all Europe, and we have seen that 
it. left no slight mark upon our literature. The 
French in the days of the Grand Monarque gave us 
an impetus in another direction at the period of 
the Restoration. When Goethe, who has been called 
the greatest literary artist of the nineteenth century, 



Age of Prose Romance, 



167 



arose in Germany, a more impassioned style of 
thought and sentiment was promoted by his influ- 
ence on our writers, especially during the period of 
poetical romance. 

We now come to the days of prose romance, and 
ask, what influences have been put forth during 
the last forty years ? Where have they originated, 
and what marks have they made ? 

A survey of the field shows that about the year 
1830, there was a general impulse given to educa- 
tion and freedom in France, England, and the 
United States, and also that there was a simultane- 
ous political excitement in those countries, having 
apparently different causes. There was a general 
breaking up of old ways of thinking and feeling, 
and literature, which grows out of men's thoughts 
and feelings, and depends to a considerable extent 
upon social and political aflairs, sympathized with 
these changes, and was aflected by them. 

We have already seen that the year was marked 
by the restoration of the Orleans dynasty in France, 
and if we search the annals of that country, we 
shall find that the new ruler made, among other 
movements the same year, those which have re- 
sulted in the present liberal system of education in 
that country. During Louis Philippe's reign, also, 
laws were enacted abolishing slavery in his domin- 
ions, though these were not thoroughly enforced 
until a later period. The changes in France also 
exerted an influence in favor of the downfall of 
Toryism in England, of which we have spoken. 



1 68 Influence of the People, 

In Germany the writers who followed Gothe not 
only exhibit the influence of his wonderful genius, 
but also bear the impress of that study of philosophy 
of which Schelling was a prominent exponent. The 
political excitement in France, which has been re- 
ferred to, was one cause of a new and more strictly 
romantic literary feeling in Germany, evident in the 
class of authors called New Germany," and in 
the so-called " Romantic School." The skepticism 
of Hume gave rise to philosophical discussions in 
Germany by Kant and his followers, from which 
resulted a new influence felt in England by many 
authors of the present century, especially apparent 
in the writings of Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson. 
Referring to the influence of modern German liter- 
ature upon our own, Dr. Craik says that in the 
earlier part of the present century it was entirely 
confined to a certain class or school of writers in 
verse. " But now," he continues, " that in the 
middle period of the century prose has taken the 
place which in the last age belonged to verse, this 
latest foreign aflection which has seized upon our 
literature has naturally acquired a much more ex- 
tended range." 

In England the present generation is more en- 
lightened in every respect than any former one has 
been, and for very good reasons. The passage of 
the Reform Bill, which has been mentioned, was 
followed in 1833 by the first public grant in that 
country in behalf of public education. Since that 



Age of Prose Romance, 169 



date such grants have become regular items in 
the expenses of government, and have very largely 
increased. There were never so many good schools 
in England as there are to-day, and the number of 
students and general readers is constantly augment- 
ing. The same year, 1833, also witnessed the pas- 
sage of a bill definitely abolishing negro slavery in 
Great Britain. 

Turning now to our own country, we find that 
at the beginning of our period, Andrew Jackson 
had just entered upon his first term of office as 
President, after a protracted and violent political 
campaign. The year 1830 saw the revival of the 
excitement on the subject of slavery, which had 
raged with so much fury in 1819-20, when the State 
of Missouri was admitted to the Union. After ten 
years of comparative though not entire quiet on this 
subject, Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker of positive views 
and ardent in upholding them, began to canvass the 
country for subscribers to a new anti-slavery journal, 
which was begun in 1 831, by William Lloyd Garri- 
son, under the title of The Liberator, The excite- 
ment on this subject was thereafter continuous until 
the enfranchisement of the blacks, by proclamation 
of President Lincoln. The march of intelligence 
in the United States during this period has never 
been paralleled, and could hardly have been con- 
ceived by the wisest of any previous century. 

This remarkable increase of intelligence has caused 
a notable increase in the number of readers, and in 



I/O 



Influence of the People, 



the average knowledge of the people, in France, 
England, and the United States during the present 
period. There has been also an increase of the 
number of thinkers in these lands, but the latter 
class by no means increases in an equal ratio with 
the former. It is necessary to bear this fact con- 
stantly in mind as we scrutinize the development of 
our age in literary affairs. 

It may not be true that the greatest number of 
our inhabitants would be found in the lowest class^ 
if ranked according to scholarly acquirements, but 
it is quite true that the highest classes in such a 
scale, would be found to contain the fewest individ- 
uals. It is therefore to be expected that the books 
of the greatest erudition should have the smallest 
number of readers, while sensational, smart, start- 
ling, conceited, and empty writing will be popular 
and profitable at once. 

This train of reasoning may be easily pursued by 
the reader. The fact stated will operate unfavorably 
to the highest development of the best pure literature 
at any age, when authors must write for a popular 
demand. It is pleasant, therefore, to be able to add 
that among the annually increasing number of super- 
ficial readers, there always is an increasing number, 
who from various causes are developing into think- 
ers, and who will of course encourage thoughtful 
writers. These need to study the very best literature 
of the past and present, to become familiar with 
it, and to learn to love that in it which is the most 
exalted, and the purest in style and sentiment. 



Age of Prose Romajice, 



171 



Before the publication of Sir Walter Scott's Wa- 
verley Novels^ the spirit of our literature was deeply 
poetical. Since that time literature has expressed 
itself more in the form of prose, and no department 
of prose writing has during the last forty years so 
greatly flourished as the prose romance. We need 
only remember the works of Irving, Cooper, Bulwer, 
Hawthorne, Thackeray, Dickens, Reade, and others 
to appreciate this truth. 

The steam locomotive, which began to roll its 
wheels with this period, is an appropriate emblem 
of the progress that marks our age. We have ad- 
vanced in that the new element of female author- 
ship has become more prominent in our literature, — 
a very interesting fact that can only be hinted in 
our brief notice of the authors of the day. We 
exhibit our progress in greater attention to finish 
and grammatical perfection, while unfortunately, we 
have left behind some of the spontaneity that was 
charming in the last age. 

Since the beginning of this era, there has been 
greater political tranquillity than during those which 
have preceded it, and the opportunity has been em- 
braced of making investigations in the domains 
of history, physical science, politics, philosophy, and 
art. The periodical literature of our generation is 
developed far beyond that of past days. In this 
direction writers have produced the solid quarterly 
review, the entertaining monthly magazine, and the 
gossipy daily and weekly news journals. The first 



1/2 



Influeiice of the People. 



gives us a considerate, and generally a reliable 
literary guide. The magazine furnishes a pleasant 
companion, and sometimes an instructive popular 
teacher. The news journal presents a photograph 
of the world's doings, with all its good, bad, and 
indifferent traits brought into prominence. The 
literary weekly journal too frequently contains little 
more than such feeble or sensational novels as 
create a temporary excitement, and impoverish the 
reader's mind, or give crude or false pictures of 
life and duty. The great pecuniary success of some 
of this class of journals is an alarming token of 
the superficiality of the mass of the minds of the 
period. On the other side, it must be added that 
the vastly increased circulation of solid works of a 
historical, doctrinal, or philosophical nature must 
be accepted as a favorable token. 

Mention has already been made of some of the 
American writers of this generation ; and it is only 
necessary to add that they have made advance in 
every line of literary activity, and command universal 
attention. The world's libraries are nowhere perfect 
in our day without a large infusion of the American 
element. To a greater extent our authors strive to 
create a national spirit in their productions, a fact 
that will be apparent as we consider the individual 
writers.-^ 

1 While the authors in former periods have been arranged in 
the order of their death, in the present chapter they are, for 
obvious reasons, inserted in the order of their birth. 



Age of Prose Romance, 



Walter Savage Landor, 1775-1864 , was the 
son of a gentleman of good family and considerable 
wealth. He pursued studies at Rugby and Oxford, 
but was insubordinate at both places, and never 
took a degree. Though his character was as in- 
consistent and contradictory as that of his sovereign, 
George IV., and exerted much influence upon his 
writings, they are not deficient in earnestness and 
importance. Lander's works are marked by genius, 
but also by rashness, wilfulness, and ungoverned 
passion. They are in parts graceful, polished, and 
scholarly, in parts inconsiderate, paradoxical, and 
offensive to good taste. He is known as a prose 
writer chiefly by his Imaginary Conversations of 
Literary Men and Statesmen. Among his poems 
are. Heroic Idyls^ Pericles and Aspasia, and Gebir^ 
Count Julian^ and other Poems, 

Henry Hallam, i 778-1859, one of the most 
judicious historians of a period noted for the care 
with which historical studies have been pursued, was 
educated at Eton School and at Oxford University. 
Enjoying a competent income, he devoted himself 
to a line of critical study in which he had no pred- 
ecessor in England. He was one of the editors 
of the Edinburgh Review, His chief works are, A 
View of the State of Europe in the Middle Ages^ 
Constitutional History of England from the Acces- 
sion of Henry VI L to the Death of George II, and 
an Introductio7i to the Literature of Europe in the 



174 



Influence of the People, 



Fifteenth^ Sixteenth^ and Seventeenth Centuries. These 
are standard works of the most painstaking, original 
investigation, and are marked by fairness, terseness, 
and perspicacity in their presentation of opinions, 
and discussions of principles. Lord Macaulay styled 
the Constitutio7ial History the most impartial book 
he had ever read. 

Henry, Lord Brougham, 17 78-1 869, was of an 
ancient family, educated at the University of Edin- 
burgh, the city of his birth, and was at an early age 
distinguished for his investigations in physics and 
mathematics. For many years he was prominent 
as a statesman, using his influence in behalf of pop- 
ular education and the abolition of the slave-trade. 
Among his writings are. Sketches of Statesmen who 
nourished in the Time of George III., Lives of Men 
of Letters and Science who flourished in the Time of 
George II L, Political Philosophy, Speeches on Social 
a7id Political Subjects, and a dissertation entitled 
Analytical and Experimental Inquiries on the Cells 
of Bees. Two of his speeches on the occasion of 
the trial of Queen Caroline in 1820 and 182 1, have 
taken an honorable place among the specimens of 
classic English oratory. 

Washington Irving, i 783-1859, sometimes called 
the American Goldsmith, and whose writings re- 
mind us of Sir Walter Scott, was a native of New 
York city. After receiving a good school education 



Age of Prose Romance, 



175 



he began the study of law, which he soon relin- 
quished for authorship. In 1807, in connection 
with his friend, James Kirke Paulding, he projected 
a serial entitled Sabnagundi^ in which the humors 
of the town were set off in a popular way. This 
was continued through twenty numbers. In 1809, 
Irving published A History of New York, from the 
Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch 
Dynasty^ by Diedrich Knickerbocker^ which was a 
humorous description of the author^s native city 
under the Dutch governors. Among his numerous 
other works are. The Sketch Book, Bracebridge Hall, 
Tales of a Traveller^ Life of Cohwibus^ Conquest of 
Granada, Tales of the Alhambra, Abbots ford and 
Newstead Abbey, Astoria, Life of Goldsmith, Ma- 
ho7net, Wolferfs Roost, and Life of Washington, 
These are written in a pure, flowing, simple style, 
and are enriched by dashes of humor and scintil- 
lations of wit. 

James Henry Leigh Hunt, 1784-1859, a school- 
fellow of Coleridge and Lamb, and a friend of 
Byron, Shelley, and Keats, was a descriptive poet 
of original genius, and an essayist of delicate fancy. 
After having been associated with his brother John, 
in conducting a paper called The News, Leigh Hunt 
joined him in establishing The Examiner, a weekly 
publication, the independent spirit of which attracted 
much attention. This paper turns our thoughts back 
to the days of Charles Lamb, for Hunt formed one 



176 



hifluence of the People. 



of the congenial circle which rendered so attractive 
the Wednesday evening receptions of the author of 
the Essays of Elia, United by similarity of literary 
and political taste, and suspected of ulterior de- 
signs, Godwin, Hunt, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Southey, 
and Coleridge frequently met at the rooms of Lamb 
to play whist and to discuss politics, art, and litera- 
ture, as well as to give expression to friendly sym- 
pathy. The Examiner criticised the measures of 
government very freely, and at last, for a too truth- 
ful picture of George IV., the proprietors were heav- 
ily fined and thrown into prison. The story of the 
two years of Leigh Hunt's imprisonment is an inter- 
esting one, for he was the object of much attention 
from his many literary friends, and he enlivened his 
solitary hours by indulging in poetical composition. 
His later years were passed in the pleasant compan- 
ionship of his friends (among whom Carlyle and 
the Brownings were then numbered), and in cheer- 
ful studies, the fruit of which is apparent in the wide 
range and desultory character of his later writings. 
Among his poems are, Captain Sword and Captain 
Fen, and the Story of the Rimini. His essays are 
included in a volume entitled The Lidicator and the 
Companion, a Miscellany for the Fields and the Fire- 
side. 

Thomas De Quincey, i 786-1859, one of the 
most peculiar and voluminous authors of the period, 
was the son of a merchant of Manchester, and a 



Age of Prose Romance. 



177 



graduate of Oxford. For fourteen years he was a 
slave to opium, and his best-remembered work is 
entitled Confessions of an English Opium Eater. 
Like Coleridge, who had the same habit, De Quin- 
cey, though one of the greatest masters of English- 
prose of the century, was a fitful worker, and some 
of his most brilliant conceptions were left uncom- 
pleted. Among his other writings are, The Elight 
of the Kalmuck Tartars^ and Murder considered as 
one of the Eine Arts. 

Richard Whately, i 787-1863, late Archbishop 
of Dublin, was one of the most active and influential 
writers of the period. In treating religious topics 
he is characterized by a peculiar charity and catho- 
licity, and he is distinguished also by a thorough 
acquaintance with the subjects he discusses, and by 
great clearness of style. Among his works are, 
Elements of Logic^ Elements of Rhetoric^ Lectures on 
Political Economy^ Annotations on Bacon's Essays, 
and on Palefs Moral Philosophy. 

Sir William Hamilton, 1788-1856, a native of 
Glasgow and a graduate of Oxford, was a profound 
thinker, a great philosopher, and a clear writer. 
Among his works are an edition of Dr. Reid's 
works, and Discus sioJis on Philosophy, which latter 
are said to contain a more exhaustive analysis of 
the intellectual processes than the work of any 
other English writer. 

12 



[1 7 8 Infitmice of the People, 



James Fenimore Cooper, 1789-1851, the volu- 
minous American novelist, was of English descent, 
a native of New Jersey, and a resident at Coopers- 
town, New York. With bold self-reliance this au- 
thor produced novels based upon the fresh romantic 
materials of his native country. He depicted the 
backwoodsman, the prairie hunter, the aboriginal 
red man, the vicissitudes of pioneer life, and the 
scenes of Indian warfare, with a picturesque pen, 
and in a national spirit. Among his works are. Pre- 
caution^ The Spy, Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, 
The Pathfi7ider, Deers layer, The Pilot, History of 
the United States Navy, Gleanings in Europe, and 
Sketches in Switzerland, His novels number more 
than thirty, are of unequal merit, and bear evidence 
of haste and sometimes of carelessness. They are 
distinctively American, and were a means of render- 
ing Europeans familiar with American scenes. 

John Keble, i 790-1866, received his early 
education from his venerated father, and was thus 
prepared, as he was also by nature, to form his 
judgments, " not by reason or argument, but by au- 
thority.'' In 1827 he published his most celebrated 
work, The Christian Year, or thoughts in verse for 
the Sundays and holidays throughout the year, 
which exhibited marked poetic genius, and has 
since passed through a hundred editions. Though 
designed for the English Church, its reception has 
illustrated the fact, that the words of the true poet 



Age of Prose Roinance. 



179 



often possess a wider significance than he himself is 
conscious of, for it has proved a favorite with devout 
Christians of all communions. From 1833 to 1844, 
Keble was Professor of Poetry at Oxford Univer- 
sity. His life, which has been compared with that 
of "holy George Herbert,'^ was, however, mainly 
passed in the unobtrusive and assiduous perform- 
ance of his duties as a parish clergyman. He ex- 
erted a gentle, yet powerful influence upon men of 
letters, bringing the charms of poetry and the great- 
est purity of life, to the aid of what has been termed 
the Oxford, or High-Church movement in the 
English Church, which commenced in 1833. In 
this he was associated with Newman, Pusey, and 
others, and to it Keble contributed some of the 
most important of the Tracts for the Times. Among 
his other works are, Lyra Innocc7itiii77i^ and an edi- 
tion of the Works of Richard Hooker^ author of 
Ecclesiastical Polity, His language is frequently 
too classical to be popular. 

William Cullen Bryant, 1794- — a native 
of the little mountain town of Cummington in west- 
ern Massachusetts, was directed in early youth by 
a judicious and cultured father to detect and avoid 
a false poetic enthusiasm, and to appreciate the 
value of correctness and compression. His father 
encouraged his youthful aspirations, and was re- 
warded by evidence of early maturity. At a time 
when the artificial style of Pope was highly extolled, 



i8o Infiuence of the People. 



young Bryant obtained some of Wordsworth's bal- 
lads. These had probably an influence on his 
future, and fixed him in his love of those pure and 
national subjects which touch the heart. Among 
Bryant's poems are, Thanatopsis^ Death of the Flow- 
ers^ Ode to the Connecticut River ^ The Forest Hy^nn^ 
The Indian Girls Lament^ The Song of Mario?i^s 
Men, a translation of Homer's Iliad ; and he has 
written a large number of prose compositions, essays, 
letters, and political papers, marked by pure and 
vigorous English. Mr. Bryant is now one of the edi- 
tors and proprietors of the New York Evening Post, 

Thomas Carlyle, 1795 — > is the son of a 

Scotch farmer. He is highly educated, being a 
graduate of the University of Edinburgh, and in 
his youth was a companion of the gifted and er- 
ratic Edward Irving. Carlyle has drawn inspiration 
from the German metaphysicians who so greatly in- 
fluenced Coleridge and other English thinkers. 
Being original and audacious, and using the Ger- 
man style, Mr. Carlyle's works are marked by com- 
plex conceits which are not generally approved. In 
the words of a late writer, the critical and biograph- 
ical essays of Carlyle first familiarized Englishmen 
with the riches of modern German thought. " For 
this work, he was incomparably better fitted than 
any man then living in Britain. Possessing a knowl- 
edge of the German tongue such as no foreigner 
ever surpassed, be was also inspired by the convic- 



Age of Prose Romance, i8i 

tion that the literature of Germany, in depth, truth- 
fulness, sincerity, and earnestness of purpose, was 
greatly superior to what was admired and relished 
at home. Gifted, moreover, in a degree altogether 
unexampled, with a talent for portraiture, he soon 
painted on the British memory the images of Schil- 
ler, Fichte, Jean Paul Richter, and other foreign 
magnates, until then almost unheard of." His 
peculiarities, being those of a bold writer with a 
strong purpose and honest convictions, deserve at 
least respectful criticism by those who may not be 
entirely in accord with the most advanced positions 
he assumes. His chief works are. Life of Schiller^ 
Sartor Resartus^ Essays^ The French Revolution^ 
Frederick the Great ^ Hero Worships etc. 

Francis Wayland, 1796-1865, a native of New 
York city, a graduate of Union College and of Ando- 
ver Seminary, and for twenty-five years President of 
Brown University, was the author of a number of 
works distinguished for independence, thoroughness, 
and perspicuity. He is chiefly known as the writer 
of works on Moral Science^ Political Economy^ and 
Intellectual Philosophy, These works have given 
their author a solid and wide-spread reputation. 

William Hickling Prescott, 1796-1859, was 
a grandson of one of the American commanders at 
the battle of Bunker Hill. He was born at Salem, 
graduated at Harvard, and intended for the study 



l82 



Influence of the People. 



of law, from which he was debarred by an affection 
of the eyes. Using the eyes of others in his inves- 
tigations, he became a historian, and produced in 
succession the History of Ferdinand and Isabella^ 
Conquest of Mexico^ Conquest of Peru, and History of 
the Reign of Philip II. These are all works of labori- 
ous original research. The first mentioned was im- 
mediately received with great praise in England, 
and was translated into German, Italian, French, 
and Spanish, and, no less than all of Prescotf s 
writings, is a standard work. The style is elevated, 
simple, firm, and dignified. 

Mark Hopkins, 1802 , is a native of Stock- 
bridge, Massachusetts, graduated at Williams Col- 
lege with the highest honors^ and since 1836 has 
been the president of that institution. His chief 
works are. Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity., 
Miscella?ieous Essays and Discourses^ Lectures on 
Moral Science^ Baccalaureates^ and The Law of Love 
and Love as a Law, The president's Baccalaureate 
sermon delivered in 1869 is entitled Spirit and 
Soul a?id Body^ a discourse on the tripartite nature 
of man. Dr. Hopkins' works are marked by elo- 
quence, practical philosophy, and the apt applica- 
tion of sound principles in morals and religion. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 , is a native 

of Boston, and a graduate of Harvard University. 
He entered the ministry of the Unitarian Church, 



Age of Prose Romance, 183 

but his course of thought rapidly led him away from 
systems of theology and ecclesiastical organizations, 
and the boldness of his attitude in all discussions 
of religion and philosophy, together with the fas- 
cination of his poetic nature, made him the chief 
person in a knot of enthusiastic men and women 
who essayed to make fresh statements of religious 
and social problems. Emerson's prose and poetry 
are alike marked by a certain clearness of insight 
rather than severity of logic ; he is impatient of con- 
sistency, and prefers to say distinctly what he thinks 
he sees now, without much caring to make compar- 
ison with previous opinion. He is brilliant and 
epigrammatic in his prose, using vigorous English, 
and his poetry is often marked by a very beautiful 
interpretation of recondite facts in nature and life. 
His writings are unintelligible to many readers, but 
he has exerted a strong influence over his contem- 
poraries of the same school. His contempt for au- 
thority, and his confidence in the sufficiency of each 
individual, have led him to a pantheistic belief, and 
to refer the sacred waitings of all nations to a com- 
mon source, with equal claims upon the respect 
of mankind. His chief published works are, Man 
Thinkmg^ Literary Ethics^ I'he Method of Nature ^ 
New Eiigland Reformers^ Poems ^ Representative Men, 
Conduct of Life, and Society and Solitude, 

Nathaniel Hawthorne, i 804-1 864, was a 
native of Salem, Massachusetts, a fellow-student 



184 Influence of the People, 



with Longfellow, and, like that poet, a graduate of 
Bowdoin College. He led for many years the life 
of a recluse, and even when occup3dng positions 
under government in Salem, and afterward as con- 
sul at Liverpool, he entered but little into active 
life. He was nevertheless a most acute while silent 
observer of men, and his mind turned constantly 
toward the deep and dark problems of human na- 
ture. The sombre life of early New England had 
a strong fascination for him, and he has left many 
pictures of it, drawn from the study of history. His 
works discover a profound sympathy with mental 
suffering, a mournful curiosity respecting the more 
hidden springs of human action, sometimes morbid 
and painful, and a delicate susceptibility to the in- 
distinct emotions. His style is exceedingly grace- 
ful, and a gentle humor plays upon the surface of 
all his writings, rendering the books very fascinat- 
ing in their art, while often painful in subject. The 
Passages from Hawthorne's Note Books, of which 
the American and English portions have thus far 
been published, edited by his widow, show the fin- 
ished character of all his studies, and the closeness 
of his observation. Among Hawthorne's works are, 
Twice-Told Tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, The 
Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, 
Wo7ider-Book for Boys and Girls, The Snow Image 
and other Twice- Told Tales, The Marble Fau7t, and 
Our Old Home, A Series of English Sketches, 



Age of Prose Romance. 185 

Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton, 1805 , is 

a native of Norfolk, England, and a graduate of 
Cambridge University. He was carefully nurtured 
by an accomplished mother, and after graduation 
rambled on foot through various parts of England 
and Scotland, and made a tour of France on horse- 
back. He was early charmed by the old romances 
of the Round Table, and recounted their legends 
in an epic poem of considerable merit, entitled 
Kifig Arthicr. He has written several plays which 
are popular in the theatres, of which are, Richelieu^ 
and The Lady of Lyons, Among his other works 
are, Rie7tzi, The Last Days of Pompeii^ The Siege of 
Granada, My Novel, The Caxto?ts, and What will he 
do with it? His fame rests mainly upon his later 
novels, which are in marked contrast with his earlier 
works. The latter, produced before their author 
had matured, are losing their place in literature on 
account of their loose morals, which are offensive to 
pure taste. He has long been a prominent states- 
man, and during a creditable political career, has 
delivered some finished speeches. 

. Henry Wads WORTH Longfellow, 1807 > is 

a native of Portknd, Maine, a graduate of Bowdoin 
College, and a versatile and voluminous poet. 
Among his prose writings are Oictre Mer and Hype- 
rion. In verse he has produced, Voices of the Night, 
The Spanish Student, The Golden Legend, Evange- 
line. The Song of Hiawatha^ The Courtship of Miles 



1 86 hiflttence of the People, 

Staitdish^ Tales of a Wayside l7tn, The New England 
Tragedies^ and translations of Dante's poems. All 
of Longfellow's writings bear marks of his scholar- 
ship, fancy, taste, and loving heart, without any 
traces of pedantry. His works are probably more 
extensively circulated and read than those of any 
other American poet. They are very popular in 
Europe, and have thus become household words on 
both sides of the sea. 

John Greenleaf Whittier, 1807 , is a 

native of Haverhill, and a resident at Amesbury, 
Massachusetts. His ancestors were of the Society 
of Friends^ with which class the poet himself sym- 
pathizes. Without a collegiate education he became 
at an early age, first an editor, then a prose writer, 
and finally a poet of purity, patriotism, and deep 
feeling. Mr. Whittier's strong anti-slavery princi- 
ples made him one of the foremost writers in the 
struggle in the United States, to which reference 
has been made. In support of this cause, he pro- 
duced The Voices of Freedom, a collection of poems 
published in Boston in 1850, and he continued to 
produce verses of the same character as long as the 
struggle lasted. His later poems have appeared in 
the current periodicals, the greater number of them 
in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine. Among his 
prose publications are, Legejids of New England, 
Margaret Cook^s yoimial, and Literary Recreations 
and Miscellanies. In verse he has written Mogg 



Age of Prose Romance. 

MegonCy The Bridal of Ferinacook, The Chapel of 
the Hermits^ Home Ballads and Foe?ns^ In War 
Time, Nauhaught the Deacon, and Snow Bound. 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1809-1861. The 
education of Elizabeth Barrett was conducted by 
her father with the most solicitous care, and in- 
cluded a thorough acquaintance with moral and 
natural philosophy, and the ancient and modern 
languages. After publishing The Seraphim and 
other Poems in 1838, she passed through a painful 
illness which confined her for years to her cham- 
ber. This affliction exerted an important influence, " 
for the period was one of deep application, and re- 
sulted in the revision of her former poems, and in 
the composition of new ones. Her taste for classic 
studies did not forsake her, and besides the writers 
of Greece, she studied parts of the Old Testament 
in the original Hebrew. In 1846, she married 
Robert Browning, one of the first poets of England, 
and thereafter resided in Florence, Italy. Mrs. 
Browning^s poems are not all popular, on account 
of their mystic and somewhat obscure nature, but 
they exhibit marked genius, rare delicacy of thought, 
intense sympathy with suffering, and indignation at 
injustice. Among her principal writings are, Prome- 
theus Bound, Lady Geraldine^s Courtship, Casa Guidi 
Windows, Au7'ora Leigh, and Drama of Exile. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1809 , a native 



i88 



Influence of the People, 



of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a graduate of 
Harvard and of Dartmouth Medical College. He 
has written many verses that are well known, among 
which are. Old Iro?tsides, 2^he Last Leaf, The Height 
of the Ridiculous, My Au7it, and On Le?tding a Punch 
Bowl, which are marked by pathos, playful fancy, 
and genial humor. He is also a prose writer, and 
has published The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 
Elsie Vernier — • a Romance of Destiny, The Guardia?i 
Angel, etc. In both prose and verse, perhaps the 
most marked characteristic of Dr. Holmes' writing 
is an incisive wit, which is quick to find weakness or 
dullness in persons or sentiment. There is a succes- 
sion of epigrammatic points which dazzle the reader, 
but, as in many similar writings, will not bear a very 
close analysis. Especially when his wit is aimed at 
religious subjects, it fails from lack of truth in its 
conception of the object attacked. Dr. Holmes has 
also furnished some contributions to the literature 
of medical science. 

Alfred Tennyson, i8io- , the present poet- 
laureate of England, is the son of a clergyman, a 
native of Lincolnshire, and a graduate of Cam- 
bridge. In 1830 he began his career as a poet by 
the publication of Poems chiefly Lyrical, a volume 
that included Claribel, Lilian, Mariana, and other 
pieces^ but which was coldly received. Two years 
later he published The Lady of Shalott, The Miller's 
Daughter, The May Queen, Lady Clara Vere de Vere, 



Age of Prose Romance, 189 

and other poems, which also created no excitement. 
In 1842 his English Idyls and other Poems appeared, 
and from that time his reputation rose rapidly. 
This last volume included the Morte d" Arthur, 
which was republished in 1870 as the Passing of 
Arthur^ The Gardener's Daughter, Godiva, St, 
Simeon Stylites, Locks ley Hall, Sir Galahad, Sir 
Launcelot and Queen Guinevere, etc. In 1847 these 
were followed by The Princess, a Medley, and In 
Memoriam^ the latter occasioned by the death of a 
loved friend, a son of Hallam, the historian. In 
1859, The Idyls of the King appeared. In 1864, 
Enoch Arden, and in 1870, The Holy Grail, in which 
last the poet returns to his long-loved Arthurian 
subjects. Tennyson lives for the most of his time at 
Farringford, a quiet retreat on the beautiful Isle of 
Wight. He combines the imagination of the poet 
with the subtlety of the metaphysician, so that 
while his love-songs pkase the sentimental, his In 
Memoriain furnishes food for thought to the medita- 
tive mind. Among the verses produced as Laureate, 
are lines On the Death of Wellington, On the Mar- 
riage of the Prince of Wales, on the fatal Charge of 
the Light Brigade, and On the Openi?tg of the Interna- 
tional Exhibition, which, though possessing historic 
interest, have some of them been severely criticised, 
and are of unequal poetic merit. The simplicity 
of Tennyson's writings, their quaintness, originality, 
and force of expression, as well as the beauty of 
their fancy, recommend them to the mind and heart, 



1 90 hifliience of the People, 

and they are highly admired wherever the English 
language is read or spoken. 

William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811-18635 
was born at Calcutta, where his father held a civil 
office. He was educated at the famous Charterhouse 
School, London, where Crashaw the poet, Isaac 
Barrow, the divine. Sir William Blackstone, Joseph 
Addison, Sir Richard Steele, John Wesley, General 
Havelock, John Leech, George Grote, and many 
other celebrities had also been taught. With an 
ample fortune, Thackeray purposed following the 
life of an artist, but, having lost his money in spec- 
ulations, he began a literary career. Among his 
works are, Letters of Michael Angelo Titmarsh^ and 
George Fitz-Boodle^ Esq,, The Book of Snobs, Vanity 
Fair^ Pendejinis, Paris Sketch Book, E7iglish Hu- 
morists of the Eighteenth Century, The Four Georges, 
The Newcomes, and The Virginians, Thackeray's 
studies in novel-writing seem to have been largely 
in the works of the earliest writers of the English 
school, Richardson, Smollett, and Fielding, and, 
like them, he aimed to give a minute picture of the 
life of men and women about him. His novels will 
probably have a new value in future days, for their 
very close and detailed portraiture of English social 
life of the period. In elaborating his work he made 
most thorough and painstaking research into what- 
ever matters of fact were to be illustrated. His 
description of scenes connected with the Battle of 



Age of Prose Ro^nance, 191 

Waterloo, in Vanity Fair, is a brilliant historical 
picture busy with moving life. Thackeray was a 
sentimentalist who concealed his sentiment under a 
thin veil of satire, and he had a strong indignation 
against every form of social meanness, manifested 
in his writings by a sustained use of satire, irony, 
and caustic pleasantry unequaled in English liter- 
ature. 

Charles Dickens, 1812-1870, addresses to-day 
a more numerous and varied circle of readers than 
any other author. He was born at Portsmouth, and 
early became attached to a London paper as re- 
porter. This occupation probably gave direction to 
his genius throughout his whole brilliant career. 
Among his earliest productions are The Posthumous 
Papers of the Pickwick Club, not only the most pop- 
ular of his writings, but perhaps the most popular 
book of the period. It is characterized by an over- 
flow of animal spirits, and an extravagance of 
humor which took the reading public by storm. 
Two of his novels, Barnahy Rudge and Tale of Two 
Cities, are connected with historic study, but the 
others draw their suggestions almost entirely from 
life in London, though the scenes of one, Martin 
Chuzzlewit, are laid partly in the United States. 
The characters he has most successfully drawn are 
taken from studies among the vagabond and eccen- 
tric elements of city life. No English writer since 
Shakespeare has invented so varied a range of 



192 



Influence of the People. 



characters. His kindliness of nature and so-called 
humanitarianism have led to a sympathy for the 
criminal, and a sentimental pity for the self-indul- 
gent and thriftless which has been complained of. 
On the other hand he has made charity fashionable, 
and has given much sound and harmless enjoyment 
to his generation, for which he is to be commended. 
He exhibits a reverence for the Bible, though his 
love of caricature has led him to draw only incon- 
sistent professors of Christianity. Among his other 
wTitings are, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twisty Dom- 
bey and Son, David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend, 
and Christmas Stories, Among the last the charm- 
ing tale of Boots at the Holly Tree Inn, is greatly 
admired. Mr. Dickens's latest novel, entitled The 
Mystery of Edwin Drood, was left in an incomplete 
condition at the time of his sudden death. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe, 18 12 , is one of 

the daughters of the late Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher, 
and a native of Litchfield, Connecticut. At the 
age of twenty-one she became the wife of Professor 
Calvin E. Stowe, who has occupied chairs in several 
theological seminaries. Mrs. Stowe was already 
known as the writer of minor works, when in 1852, 
her book entitled Uncle lom's Cabin, appeared. In 
consequence of the excitement on the subject of 
slavery, as well as of the merits of the story, it met 
unexampled success. Though some of the negro 
talk would not be recognized in the South, and not- 



Age of Prose Romance. 



193 



withstanding other defects, the justice with which 
the good points of southern character are exhibited, 
the powers of description manifested, the pure mo- 
rality and the humane purpose of this book, gave it 
great value, and it was sold to an extent without 
precedent. Among Mrs. Stowe's later works are, 
Nina Gordon^ first published as Dred^ Agnes of 
Sorrento^ The Minister's Wooing^ The Pearl of Orr's 
Island^ and a work on the mysterious Life of Lord 
Byron. The last mentioned has created great 
excitement in England and America, causing a 
new discussion of Byron's pernicious life and writ- 
ings. 

Robert Browning, 1812 , was born in one 

of the suburbs of London, is of dissenting parent- 
age, and was educated at London University. At 
the age of twenty he went to Italy, where his tastes 
led him to study thoroughly the past and present 
traits of Itahan Hfe. These he saw in far different 
aspects from those under which travellers and stu- 
dents have usually observed them. His first appeal 
to the public which was acknowledged, was made 
in the drama of Paracelsus in 1836, since which he 
has produced Sordello, in 1840 ; Pippa Passes and 
other poems in a collection called Bells and Pome- 
granates^ published from 1842 to 1846 ; Men and 
Women, in 1855 ; Dramatis Persofice, in 1864 ; and 
The Ring and the Book, in 1869. These exhibit 
great originality, power, subtlety, and depth of 



194 



biflueiice of the People, 



feeling. Mr. Browning's writings are deficient in 
the elements of popularity, though he stands con- 
fessedly in the front rank of English poets. Dif- 
fering entirely from Tennyson, he is however his 
greatest rival in the estimation of thoughtful stu- 
dents of literature. His subjects are sometimes 
English, but more frequently are drawn from medi- 
aeval history, — Oriental, Italian, or Spanish scenes, 
while his characters bear Italian and German names. 
Of Mr. Browning's shorter pieces, The Pied Piper of 
IIameli?i, How they brought Good News from Ghent to 
Aix^ and The Lost Leader, are deservedly esteemed 
among the finest specimens of modern English 
poetry. 

John Lothrop Motley, 1814- - — late United 
States Minister at the Court of St. James, is a native 
of Dorchestef, Massachusetts, and a graduate of 
Harvard University. He has been* a severe student, 
and resided in Germany at one time for the purpose 
of availing himself of the great advantages afforded 
in that country. After publishing some spirited 
works of minor importance, Mr. Motley produced 
his great histories of the Pise of the Dutch Republic. 
and the History of the United Netherlands, which 
show deep research, are of picturesque style and 
permanent value. These have been extensively 
republished in other countries, and give the author 
a foremost rank among the most careful historians 
of England and America. 



Age of Prose Romance. 



195 



James Anthony Froude, 18 18 , is a native 

of Devonshire, a graduate of Oxford, and an Eng- 
lish High Churchman. Among his early writings 
is the Nemesis of Faith, a gloomy and somewhat 
skeptical work. He has since produced The History 
of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death 
of Elizabeth, and Short Studies on Great Subjects. 
Notwithstanding its original title the history is con- 
tinued only to the date of the Spanish Armada in 
1588, the object of the author having been to sketch 
the transition from the Catholic England of a dom- 
inant church, monasteries, and pilgrimages, to the 
England of progressive intelligence. Conceiving 
this transition period to have ended with the defeat 
of the Armada, Mr. Froude closes his work with 
the history of that, event. Some portions are writ- 
ten in the style of Carlyle, of whom the author is 
an admirer. It is eloquent, rich in the results 
of research, exhibits great powers of generalization, 
is graphic and clear. In expressing opinions of 
Henry VIIL and Mary Stuart, Mr. Froude avoids 
too indiscriminate censure of the former, and too 
uniform praise of the latter. The fruit of the study of 
original documents, this work is deservedly popular. 

John Ruskin, 18 19- , is a native of Edin- 
burgh, a graduate of Oxford, and a writer on art. 
Mr. Ruskin has exerted an important influence 
upon English taste and knowledge of art by his 
eloquent and original writings upon those subjects^, 



ig6 Influence of the People. 

though the reader is confused by his paradoxical 
and inconsistent statements. Having turned from 
the discussion of art to political economy and other 
topics demanding cool judgment, Mr. Ruskin has 
begun to lose the respect as an authority which he 
had previously commanded. Among his works are, 
Modern Painters^ their Superiority in the Art of 
Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters ; Seven 
Lamps of Architecture^ Seven Stones of Venice^ Lec- 
tures on Architecture and Painting^ Pre-Raphael- 
ism^ Sesame and Lilies^ Giotto a?td his Works, Ethics 
sf the Dust, etc. These are marked by beauty of 
expression, originality, eloquence, and brilliancy, 
combined with enthusiasm in the propagation of 
the author's ideas. 

James Russell Lowell, 1819 , is a native 

of Cambridge, and a graduate of Harvard, in which 
university he is a professor. His writings in prose 
and verse are serious, humorous, satirical, and im- 
aginative. Among his prose works are. Conversa- 
tions on some Old Poets, Papers in the North Amer- 
ican Review, Fireside Travels and Among My Books, 
a collection of essays. In verse he has published 
The Biglow Papers, a satire directed against war 
and slavery ; A Fable for Critics, Vision of Sir 
Launfal, from the Round Table Romances, and The 
Cathedral. He is editor of the North American 
Review, and contributes critical articles of the high- 
est order to it, and to other current publications. 



Age of Prose Romance. 



197 



Matthew Arnold, 1822 , is the eldest son 

of the celebrated Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby. 
He is a graduate of Oxford, is known as a poet of 
classic tastes, and as a literary critic of the French 
school, of which Sainte-Beuve, lately deceased, was 
the most prominent representative. Among his 
works are, The Strayed Revellers, and other Foems^ 
Empedocles on jEtna, Lectures on Translating Homer ^ 
Essays on Criticism, Merope, and Tristram and Iseult. 
His subjects are drawn both from the classics and 
from the romances of his country. He is reputed 
one of the editors of The Academy, an English 
journal. 

George William Curtis, 1824 , is a native 

of Rhode Island. He began his career of authorship 
by producing the Nile Notes of a Howadji, written 
when he was travelling on the river Nile. This 
was followed by the Howadji in Syria, and Lotus 
Eating, Mr. Curtis was in 1852 one of the original 
editors of Putnam's Monthly Magazine, in the col- 
umns of which first appeared The Potiphar Papers, 
a caricature of fashionable life in New York city. 
Among his other writings are Prue and I, and 
Trumps, Mr. Curtis is a lecturer of finished elo- 
quence, and discusses politics, literature, and the 
rights of woman. He is still a writer for the press, 
and the periodicals of Harper and Brothers contain 
many vigorous articles from his pen. 



198 



Influence of the People, 



William Morris, 1835 , was born at Wal- 

thamstow, near London, and received the education 
of an English gentleman, graduating at Oxford. He 
early formed associations with a small knot of men 
in art and literature whose taste was cultivated by a 
profound study of historic art and of nature. In 
company with others he established a fine art busi- 
ness in London, which has done much to introduce 
a high order of decorative art, not only into eccle- 
siastical but into dgmestic architecture. Mr. Mor- 
ris's best known poetical works are The Life and 
Death of Jasoii^ and The Earthly Paradise, the latter 
a collection of stories, drawn half from classic, half 
from northern myths, told with exquisite grace and 
w^armth of color. His style is remarkable for the 
skill with which he uses the best English words for 
his purpose, recovering many that have dropped out 
of use, and giving a quaint archaic touch to his 
writing. In a period when poetry is largely sub- 
jective in tone, he is preeminently a story-teller, 
dealing with form and color in his poetic art, and 
giving the appreciating reader almost the pleasure 
of looking at a picture;" his men and women are 
heroes and heroines of a fair world, in which they 
move, not far from human sympathy, but just above 
human likeness. His studies have been largely in 
early Icelandic literature, and he has translated into 
prose some of the Sagas, in company with E. Mag- 
nussen, an Icelandic scholar, rendering the stories 
into an English dress that is remarkable for its an- 



Age of Prose Romance, 199 

tique form and the richness of its Saxon phrase. 
The Story of Grettir the Strong^ and The Story of the 
Volsungs and Niblungs^ belong to this class. Mr. 
Morris is to be associated in current English liter- 
ature with the painter and poet Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti, and with Algernon Charles Swinburne, 
although the last named has shown an eagerness 
for sensual subjects, which is likely to destroy the 
interest felt in his singular melody of verse. 



In these First Steps we have been obliged to neg- 
lect the loved and honored name of many an author 
of high rank, whose works we should have been 
delighted to study ; but if we have obtained a com- 
prehensive view of the subject, and have become 
sufficiently interested to continue the study further, 
the object presented at the outset is accomplished. 



Though the present age exhibits a greater devel- 
opment of prose romance than of any other class of 
English literature, the writers of our generation have 
produced very much that is not prose, and much 
that is not romance. We have had Hallam, and 
Froude, and Motley ; Brougham, De Quincey, and 
Arnold ; Lowell, and Holmes, and Curtis ; Long- 
fellow, Tennyson, and Whittier ; Carlyle, Ruskin, and 
Emerson ; Wayland, Whately, and Hamilton ; and 
we might mention many more, the fruit of whose 



200 



Influence of the People, 



thought is the strong meat upon which the manly 
American as well as the hearty children of Britain 
are to be nourished and strengthened for their prog- 
ress onward and upward ! 



The first literary character we found in Britain 
was the bard or gleeman, who was a wanderer some- 
times, but often appeared as a retainer of the baron, 
in whose lofty hall he recited the history or fable of 
older days. He was a favorite with the baron's 
hearth-sharers, and when the board was cleared, 
and the cup-bearers passed the foamy mead from 
guest to guest, he arose to sing of love and of war. 
Clad in his flowing robes, with his venerable beard, 
as he became more and more excited by his song, 
he transmitted his enthusiasm to the rough men 
about the board, and the hall was merry. 

In the dimly lighted cloisters of the Benedictine 
Abbey the literary man of England was long buried. 
There, hidden from the world, he was permitted to 
labor lovingly, with more thought for the letter than 
for the spirit of the Gospel he so splendidly illumi- 
nated. There, walking under the round Norman 
arches, and up the steep stone stairway, we saw 
him at his work. 

Next, when our speech was little used in books, 
we paid a visit to two of the Greyfriars, or Francis- 
cans, and found Roger Bacon, and his master Rob- 
ert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, dressed in their 



Age of Prose Romance, 201 

coarse gray gowns, with heads and feet bare. Be- 
longing to an order the aim of which was to heal the 
poor and succor the distressed, they were explorers 
of nature and students of doctrine, and they gave 
scholarship a more practical direction. 

In our next period we found that abuses had 
arisen in the land by reason of the mendicant friars, 
and the author of the Vision of Piers Plowman^ in 
our earliest allegory, produced his charming pictures 
of life, and, with a love for the 'people, labored to 
give them the right to read the Bible, and fought 
every variety of abuse of power. John Wiclif too, 
issued from his quiet home at Lutterworth those 
stirring conversations and appeals which sent •the 
English laymen and humble priests all over the 
land preaching the doctrines of the Lollards, and 
the supremacy of the Bible. 

At this time that shadowy knight, Sir Thomas 
Malory, gave the land his collection of Round Table 
Romances, which in their disconnected form had 
already modified our literature, but which in their 
new arrangement have not yet ceased to exert their 
influence. 

Then too, Chaucer and Gower and Latimer arose, 
all modified by the sturdy Lollard of Lutterworth. 

The next chapter showed us the famous Mer- 
maid Club, instituted by Sir Walter Raleigh, the 
favorite of Queen Elizabeth ; and we were pleased 
with the wit-combats between Shakespeare and 
Jonson, of which old Thomas Fuller had imagined 



202 



hijluence of the People. 



the details before us. We liked to think of these 
giants surrounded by Beaumont, Fletcher, Selden, 
Carew, Donne, and others, even if we were doubt- 
ful of the truth of the picture. It might have been 
true. 

These all passed away. In the same Bread 
Street on which the Mermaid Inn was situated, 
John Milton, the ornament of the next period, was 
born. We saw him sitting in Whitehall, Latin secre- 
tary to Oliver Cromwell. 

Cromwell died, and Charles II. came again to 
AVhitehall, and it was the very year that John 
Bunyan entered the jail at Bedford. While Bun- 
yarrwas working at his great allegory, Pepys and 
Evelyn were making those minute records of court 
life and political doings which are so charming 
as we read them to-day. The great wits were 
holding their historic meetings at Will's Coffee- 
House, and Addison and Steele were noting their 
doings. The comic dramatists were corrupting 
the theatres, and Dryden was debasing English' 
verse. 

The next chapter showed us the people captivated 
with Robinson Crusoe, devoutly singing the sweet 
lyrics of Watts, and exciting their baser passions 
with the pages of Smollett or Fielding. 

It was a pleasanter scene, when we looked upon 
the Literary Club of Dr. Johnson, and saw a pic- 
ture, which the painter's pencil and the graver's 
burin have reproduced, that we may hang it upon 



Age of Prose Romance. 203 

the walls of our homes and keep fresh in our 
memory the forms of the giants there were in those 
days. 

Before we leave our literary friends, we must cast 
one glance at the turreted pile called Abbotsford, 
and drop a tear upon the grave of Scott under the 
ruined arches of Dryburgh Abbey. We must give 
one long wishful look at the Sleepy Hollow to which, 
in fulfillment of his early dreams, Washington Irving 
stole away from the world and its distractions, and, 
under the. shades of his ivy-covered cottage at Sun- 
nyside, dreamed away the last golden days of his 
fruitful life. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



The student who wishes to advance beyond the 
first steps in English Literature must make himself 
familiar with the authors in the best editions of 
their works. The following bibliographical list aims 
to include correct and available editions, avoiding 
such as are of excessive cost. Other things being 
equal, preference is given to American publica- 
tions. 

Some of the authors do not, however, appear 
either in American editions or in editions of low 
price. This is especially true of books of the period 
of immature English, which are not in great popular 
demand. A number of societies exist in England, 
organized for the purpose of republishing such of 
these works as have exerted an influence upon liter- 
ature. Among these are The Roxburghe Club, The 
Early English Text Society, The Chaucer Society, 
The ^Ifric Society, and The Camden, Shakespeare, 
and Percy Societies. These have done and are still 
doing a grand work in familiarizing our generation 
with much that merits remembrance, though their 



Bibliography. 205 



publications are in many instances quite expensive, 
and often very scarce. For the student they are in- 
dispensable, but the general reader may find some 
of the same works in cheaper and less scholarly 
forms. The English reprints, edited by Edward Ar- 
ber, and published by Alexander Murray and Son, 
London, are elegant and cheap, and the well-known 
libraries of Henry G. Bohn, now published by Bell 
and Daldy, London, are too familiar to need de- 
scription here. Leypoldt and Holt, of New York, 
are agents of the celebrated Tauchnitz Editions, 
published in Leipzig, which include many authors 
mentioned in this book. These are cheap and uni- 
form. Some of the publications of John Russell 
Smith, of London, are also worthy of notice ; while 
in this country the Library of Old English Divines 
projected by Hurd and Houghton, and of which the 
works of Dr. South are already published, is an 
effort in the same direction. 

Addison, Joseph, — Complete. By Prof. G. W, Greene. 6 
vols. i2mo, 1853. Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott & Co. 

Complete, 3 vols. 8vo. New York, Harper & Bros. 

Spectator, A. Chalmers. 8 vols. i6mo. Boston, Little, 
Brown, & Co. 

Spectator in Miniature. 2 vols. i8mo. New York, Harper 
& Bros. 

^LFRic's Homilies. — Translated by Benjamin Thorpe. 

London, ^Ifric Society, 2 vols. 8vo, 1843, 1846. 
Alfred the Gr'ea.t. — Jubilee Editioii, whole works, with 

preliminary essays. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1858. Rev, 

Samuel Fox. Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. 

Bohn's Antiquarian Library. London, Bell & Daldy. 
Ancren Riwle, The : A treatise on the rules and duties of 

monastic life, edited and translated by James Morton^ B. 

A, London, 1853. Small quarto. Camden Society. 



206 



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Arnold, Matthew. — Essays in Criticism, i vol. i6mo ; and 

New Poems, i vol. i6mo. Boston, Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
Arnold, Thomas. — Lectures on Modern History, i vol. 

i2mo ; and History of Rome, i vol. 8vo. New York, D. 

Appleton & Co. 
Life and Correspondence, by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. 2 

vols. i2mo. Boston, Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
AscHAM, Roger. — Complete Works, by Rev. Dr. Giles^ 4 

vols. 8vo. London, John Russell Smith, 1866. 
Toxophilus and the Schoolmaster, by Edtuard Arber. 2 

vols. London, A. Murray & Son. 

Bacon, Francis. — Most complete edition. By J. Spedding^ 

R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath. 15 vols. 8vo. New York, 

Hurd & Houghton. 
Essays, Annotated by Archbishop Whately, with glossarial 

index, i vol. 8vo. Boston, Lee & Shepard, 1869. 
Novum Organum and Advancement of Learning. Bohn's 

Scientific Library, i vol. i2mo. Bell & Daldy, London, 

1868. 

Bacon, Roger. — Opus Majus, edited by Dr. Samuel Jebb. 

I vol. folio. London, 1733. ' 
Baxter, Richard. — Works, with Preface, Memoir, and 

Essay on his Life and Genius. 4 vols. Svo. London, 

1854. Little, Brown, & Co., Boston. 
Reformed Pastor, i vol. Svo. R. Carter & Bros., New 

York. 

Beaumont and Fletcher. — A popular selection by Z^'/^/^ 

Hunt. I vol. i2mo. Bohn's Standard Library. 
Bentham, Jeremy. — Works, by ^S/^ J. Bowring. 11 vols. 

Svo. Edinburgh, 1843. 
'B'E.o\YVi.^. — John M. Kemble. i2mo. London, 1833. This 

edition contains a glossary. 
A. D. Wackerbarth. i6mo. London, 1849. English 

verse. 

Best edition by Benjamin Thorpe, published in England. 
Expensive and difficult to be obtained in this country. 
Berkeley, Bishop George. — Works and Life. J. Stock. 

London, 1820. 3 vols. Svo. 
Bible, The, Versions oi-— Bosworth and Waring. Four 
versions of A. D. 360-995, 1389 (Wiclif), and 1586 (Tin- 
dale). I vol. Svo. London, J. Russell Smith. 
Annals of the English Bible, by C. Andersgn. 2 vols. Svo. 
London, 1S45. 

BoLiNGEROKE, LoRD. — Works, edited by David Mallet. 5 
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Brougham, Henry, Lord. — Speeches. 4 vols. 8vo. 1843. 
Historical Sketches of Statesmen and Men of Letters and 

Science of the Time of George III. 3 vols. Svo. 1843. 
Brown, William. — Life and Poems. Chalmers's English 

Poets, vol. vi. 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. — Complete Works. 5 

vols. 32mo. New York, James Miller. 
Browning, Robert. — Complete Works. 7 vols. i6mo. 

Boston, Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
Bryant, William Cullen. — Poetical Works. 3 vols. i2mo 
New York, D. Appleton & Co. 
Letters. 2 vols. i2mo. New York, G. P. Putnam & Son. 
Translation of the Iliad of Homer. 2 vols. 8vo. Boston, 
Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
Bunyan, John. — Works, with preface by George Whitejicld. 
2 vols, folio. London, 1767-68. 
Pilgrim's Progress, with Notes by G. Offor, no illustrations, 
engraved by Dalziels. i vol. quarto. New York, G. 
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Illustrated Edition. Svo. New York, American Tract 
Society. 

Illustrated Edition. 24mo. Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott & 
Co. 

Illustrated Edition. 32mo. Notes by Newton, Bradford^ 
and Hawkes. New York, G. Routledge & Sons. 

Illustrated. By Southey, i vol. i2mo. New York, Harper 
& Bros. 

Burke, Edmund. — Complete Works. 12 vols, crown 8vo. 
Boston, Little, Brown, & Co. 
Complete Works. Bohn^s British Classics. 9 vols. i2mo. 

London, Bell & Daldy. 
Works, with a Memoir. 3 vols. 8vo. New York, Harper 
& Bros. 

Burnet, Gilbert. — History of My Own Time, with Notes 
by Dartmouth^ Hardwicke, Onslow, and Swift; and 
History of the Reformation of the Church of England. 3 
vols. Svo. London, 1S57. Little, Brown, & Co., Boston. 
Burns, Robert. — Life and Works, by Robert Chambers, 4 
vols. i2mo. New York, Harper & Bros. 

Globe Edition, i vol. crown Svo. McMillan & Co., 
London. The best cheap and complete. 

Poems. 3 vols. iSmo. Boston, Fields, Osgood, & Co. 

Poems, with Glossary, etc. i vol. i2mo. New York, D. 
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Poems, I vol. Tauchnitz Edition. New York, Leypoldt & 
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Poems, edited by Rev, George Giljillan, 2 vols, in i. 8vo. 

New York, 1858. 
Hudibras, with Notes by Nash, i vol. i6mo. Globe 

Edition. New York, D. Appleton & Co. 
Hudibras, with Life of Butler. i vol. 32mo. Boston, 

Roberts Bros. 

Complete Poems. 2 vols. i8mo. Fields, Osgood, & Co., 
Boston. 

Byron, Lord. — ^ Poems. 10 vols. i8mo. Boston, Fields, 
Osgood, & Co. 

Complete Works, with Life by Moore. 4 vols. 8vo. New 

York, W. J. Widdleton. 
Tauchnitz Edition. 5 vols. New York, Leypoldt & Holt. 

CiEDMON. — Wm. H. F. Bosanquety translated into English 

verse. London, i860. 
Campbell, Thomas. — Poems, i vol. i8mo. Boston, Fields, 
Osgood, & Co. 
Poems. I vol. i2mo. New York, D. Appleton & Co. 
Carlyle, Thomas. — Works. 6 vols. i2mo. New York, 
Harper & Bros. 
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. 4 vols. 8vo. New 

York, Hurd & Houghton. 
Best edition now publishing, by Chapman & Hall, London, 
and Scribner, Welford, & Co., New York. To be in 
about 30 vols. 8vo. Revised by the author. 
Tauchnitz Edition. 20 vols. New York, Leypoldt & Holt. 
Chaucer, Geoffrey.- — By Alexander Chalmers^ in his Eng- 
lish Poets, vol. i. 8vo. London, 18 10. 
Canterbury Tales, by Thomas Tyrw hi ft yWiih. Essay and 

Notes, London, 1822. 5 vols. i2mo. 
The same, illustrated, i vol. i6mo. D. Appleton & Co., 
New York. 

Legends of Good Women, by Hiram Corson^ with Notes, 
etc. I vol. 8vo. Leypoldt & Holt, New York. 

The Early English Text Society has published Chaucer's 
Prose Works in several volumes by various editors. 
Cheke, Sir John. — See Chalmers'' Biographical Dictionary, 
vol. ix. p. 225. 

Chronicle, The Anglo-Saxon. — Edited by Benjamin 
Thorpe- 2 vols- London, 1861. 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. — Complete in 7 vols. 8vo. * 
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Poems. I vol. Tauchnitz Edition. New York, Leypoldt 

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Collier, Jeremy. — A Short View of the Immorality and Pro- 

faneness of the English Stage. London, i vol. 8vo. 1698. 
Collins, William. — Poems, i volume iSmo. Boston, 

Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
CoNGREVE, William. — Chalmers's English Poets, vol. x. 
Cooper, James Fenimore. — Works, with a biographical 

sketch by Wm. CttUen Bryant. 32 vols. Svo- New 

York, Hurd & Houghton. 
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Pearson. Parker Society, Cambridge, 1844. 
Cowley, Abraham. — Life and Works, in Chalmers's English 

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Essays, with Life, Notes, and Illustrations, i vol. i8mo. 
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Cowper, William.— Complete Works, by Soiithey, illustrated. 
8 vols. In Bohn's Library, London, Bell & Daldy. 
Poems, by Rev. Thos. Dale. 2 vols. 8vo. New York, 

Harper & Bros. 
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CuDWORTH, Ralph. — Intellectual System, Immutable 

Morality, etc. 2 vols. 8vo. Andover, 1837-38. 
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7 vols. 8vo. Bohn's Library, Bell & Daldy, London. 
Robinson Crusoe, various editions by Geo. Routledge & 

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Robinson Crusoe. Illustrated, i vol. Svo. Hurd & 

Houghton, New York. 
Robinson Crusoe, i vol. Tauchnitz Edition. New York, 
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Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
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14 



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8vo. London, 1839. 
Also Chalmers's English Poets, vol. v. 
Drayton, Michael. — Alexander Chalmers in the Works of 
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Drummond, William of Hawthornden. — Life and Poems. 
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Mitford. 2 vols. 8vo. New York, Harper & Bros. 
Globe Edition. Complete, with memoir. W, D, Christie, i 

vol. i2mo. London. 
Poems. 5 vols. i8mo. Boston, Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
Poems. I vol. 8vo. G. Routledge & Sons, New York. 
Poems. I vol. i6mo. D. Appleton & Co., New York. 
D wight, Timothy. — Theology explained and defended, in a 
series of sermons. 4 vols. 8vo. New York, Harper & , 
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Edwards, Jonathan. — Works. 4 vols. New York, R. 

Carter & Bros. 
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Boston, Fields, Osgood, & Co 
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Poems. I vol. i2mo. London, 1704. 
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Bohn's Library. Bell & Daldy, London. 

Fielding, Henry. — Novels. Amelia, Tom Jones, Memoir 
by Thos. Roscoe, 3 vols. i2mo. New York, Harper & 
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Selected Novels, with Smollett's. 6 vols. New York, G. 

Routledge & Sons. 
Tom Jones, i vol. Tauchnitz edition. New York, Leypoldt 

& Holt. 

Ford, John. — An expurgated edition in Murray's Family 

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Fuller, Thomas. — Church History of Britain. J. Nichols. 

3 vols. 8vo. London, 1842. 

Worthies of England. P. A. NicttalL 3 vols. 8vo. London, 
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Holy and Profane State, i vol. i6mo. London, 1840. Also 
I vol. i6mo. Boston, Little, Brown, & Co. 

Good Thoughts in Bad Times, and other Papers, i vol. 
i6mo. Boston, Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
Gay, John. — Poems. 2 vols. i8mo. Boston, Fields, Osgood 
&Co. 

Gibbon, Edward. — Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 
with Notes by Milman and Giiizot. 6 vols. i2mo. New 
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Goldsmith, Oliver. — Miscellaneous Works, hy James Prior. 

4 vols. i2mo. G. P. Putnam & Son, New York. 

Life, by Washington Irving, 2 vols. ; History of Greece, i vol. ; 
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and other Works. 8vo. London, Caxton Society. J. 

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York, G. P. Putnam & Son. 
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Johnson, Samuel. — Works, with an Essay on his Life and 
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Routledge & Sons. 
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vols. 8vo. London, 1824-30. Boston, Little, Brown, & 

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Bell & Daldy, London. 
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vols. i6mo. Boston, Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
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i6mo. Boston, Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
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Dramas and Poems, with steel portrait, i vol. 32mo. 
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MorXwil^-III and Death of Jason. I vol. :6mo. 

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MotS" JOHN LOTHROP— Dutch Republic. 3 vols. 8vo. 

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Quarles, Francis. 
Enchiridon, London, published by J. Russell Smith, i vol. • 
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Scott, Sir Walter. — Illustrated Library Edition, 25 vols. 
i6mo. Boston, Fields, Osgood, & Co. An excellent 
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Waverley Novels. Library Edition. 25 vols. 8vo. Edin- 
burgh,, 1852. 

Same. 48 vols. 8vo. Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott & Co. 
People's Edition. Same publishers, 6 vols. 8vo. 
Poetical Works. Globe Edition. Same publishers, i vol. 
i2mo. 

Poems. 9 vols. i8mo. Boston, Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
Waverley Novels. Cheap edition. 25 vols, fine type. New 
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Bibliography, 



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Cheap and reliable. Globe Edition. McMillan & Co., Lon- 
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Shelley, Percy Byssche. — Poems. 4vols. i8mo. Boston, 

Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
Sidney, Sir Philip. — Complete Works. 3 vols. 8vo. 

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Miscellaneous Works, with Memoir, by W. Gray, Oxford, 

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EXPLANATIONS OF TITLES, PRONUN- 
CIATION, ETC. 



Aix, aks. 

Ancren Riwle, an-kren' ri-ule. 
Angeln, an'geln. 
Arcadia, a pastoral district in 
Greece. 

Aryan languages are those of 
which Sanscrit exhibits 
most nearly the original 
form. Aryan is derived 
from the Sanscrit, and 
means noble, and is kept in 
memory by the modern 
name Iran, for Persia. 

Ascham, as'kam. 

Aurich, ow'rik. 

Bede, beed. 
Beowulf, be-o^voolf. 
Biathanatos, death by violence. 
Boccacio, bok-kat'cho. 
Boethius, bo-e'thi-us. 
Burger, bur'ger. 

Caedmon, kad'mon. 

Cenci, chen'chee. 

Confessio Amantis, a lover's 
confession. 

Cophetua, co-phet'ua, an im- 
aginary African king men- 
tioned by Shakespeare and 
Tennyson, besides Percy. 



Deist, one who believes in the 
existence of God, but dis- 
believes revealed religion. 

De Mirabili Potestate Artis et 
Natura, of the miracles of 
art and nature. 

De Retardandis Senectutis 
Accidentibus, on avoiding 
the infirmities of old age. 

De Speculis, of minute things. 

Duessa, double-minded. 

Dun Edin, Edinburgh. 

Epipsychidion, the little soul ; 

a term of endearment. 
Epithalamia, nuptial songs. 

Fichte, fich'ta. 
Frisia, free'zhi-a. 

Giaour, jour, a dog, an infi- 
del ; a term of contempt 
applied by Turks to Chris- 
tians. 

Giotto, jot^to. 

Goethe or Gothe, geh'ta. 

Guiccioli, guit-che-o^i. 

Heart of Mid-Lothian, the old 
jail of Edinburgh, taken 
down in 1817. 

Hengist, hen'gist. 



Dante, dan/te. 



II Penseroso, the sad. 



Explanations of Titles, etc. 



221 



Jacobi, ya-co'bi. 

Keswick, kez^k. 

L' Allegro, the gay or merry. 
Lausanne, 15-zan^ 

Magna Charta, mag^na-kar'- 
ta, the great charter of 
English liberties, signed by 
King John, 12 15, at Runny- 
mede. 

Masaniello, ma-sa-ne-el'lo. 
De Medici, de med'e-che. 
Metempsychosis, transmigra- 
tion of the soul. 

Novum Organum, the new 
Instrument of Reasoning. 
Lord Bacon followed the 
title given by Aristotle — 
Organum — to his great 
work on the science of 
reason. 

Opus Majus, the greater 
work (or more important 
writings). 

Opus Minus, the lesser work. 

Opus Tertium, the third work. 

Perspectiva, on sensible ob- 
jects. 
Piers, Peter. 
Pompeii, pom-pa'yee. 
Principia, principles. 

Salmagundi, a mixture, an 
olio, a medley, a miscellany. 
Schiller, S9hil'ler. 
Schleswig, sles^vik. 



Schley, shla. 

Semitic languages are those 
of which Arabic is the most 
polished and most widely 
disseminated, but of which 
Hebrew is the most impor- 
tant and interesting. 

Shovel-board, a game. 

Sluys, slois. 

Smectymnuus, the title of a 
work published in 1641 by 
five Presbyterian divines, 
and formed from the initials 
of their names, Stephen 
Marshall, Edmund Calamy, 
Thomas Young, Matthew 
Newcomen, William Spurs- 
tow. 

Tabard, a light garment 
formerly worn over armor. 

Tables, backgammon, so 
called by Chaucer, Shake- 
speare, Bacon, etc. 

Thanatopsis, than'a-top^sis, a 
view of, or meditation on 
death. 

Toxophilus, the lover of 
archery. 

Trialogus, a colloquy of three 
persons. 

Turanian languages are those 
not Aryan or Semitic. The 
name is applied to the 
nomadic races of Asia, as 
opposed to the agricultural, 
or Aryan races. 

Wieland, ve^land. 
Wycherley, wych^er-ley 



INDEX. 



The figures in parentheses refer to the sj>ecial sketches of the atithors 
indicated. 



Abney, Sir Thomas, ii8. 
Adams, John, 131. 
Adams, John Quincy, 151. 
Addison, Joseph, (104,) iio, 

III, 148, 190. 
Age of Elizabeth, 67. 
Age of Johnson, 28, 128-143. 
Age of Poetical Romance, 28, 

144-163. 
Age of Pope, 28, 1 12-127. 
Age of Prose Romance, 28, 

164-203. 
Alaric, 10. 

Alfred, King, 31, (35,) 51. 
Alfric, Archbishop, (35.) 
Allegory, the first English, 65. 
Allen, Horatio, builds a loco- 
motive, 166. 
America, literature in, 130. 
America, original style in, 147. 
American authors, 172. 
American period in America, 

130. 147- 

American settlements, 14. 

Ames, Fisher, 131. 

Ancren Riwle, the, (43.) 

Anglia, 16. 

Anglo-Saxon, 16. 

Anglo-Saxon, the ^:.rm mis- 
used, 30. 

Anne, Queen, 113. 

Antoinette, Marie, 141. 



Arnold, Matthew, (197,) 199. 
Arnold, Thomas, v., (156,) 197. 
Arrangement of authors in 

this book, 172. 
Arthurian Romances, 11, 42, 

58, 59, 148, 185, 189, 196, 

201. 

Ascham, Roger, (63,) 66- 
Augustan Age of English 
literature, 14, 113. 

Bacon, Francis, (76,) loi. 

Bacon, Roger, (46,) 200. 

Ballads and rude legends, 71. 

Ballads, their riches and 
style, 152. 

Bancroft, George, 136. 

Barlow, Joel, 131. 

Barrow, Isaac, 190. 

Bartram, John, 130. 

Baxter, Richard, (93,) 95. 

Beauclerk, Topham, 128. 

Beaumont and Fletcher, (77,) 
156, 202. 

Beecher, Dr. Lyman, 192. 

Bede, the venerable, 51. 

Beginning of English litera- 
ture, 36. 

Beginnings, a period of, 65. 

Belknap, Jeremy, 131. 

Bellamy, Joseph, 131. 

Bentham, Jeremy, 151, 162- 



Index. 



223 



Beowulf, the tale of, (33.) 
Berkeley, Bishop, (119.) 
Bible, the, 46, 74, 75, 92, 139, 

160, 192, 201. 
Bible, influence of, 201. 
Bible, influences Burns, 139. 
Bible, the, its translations, 50. 
Bible, the authorized version, 

(750 92. 
Bible, reverenced by Dickens, 

192. 

Bibliography, 204. 
Bigelow, Hon. John, 137. 
Blackstone, Sir William, 190. 
Blake, Wm., 125. 
Boccaccio, 50, 152. 
Bodleian Library, 8. 
Bolingbroke, 116, (119.) 
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 15. 
Boswell, James, 136. 
Bosworth Field, battle of, 12. 
Bourbons expelled from 

France, 165. 
Broken English, 26, 37-44. 
Brougham, Henry, Lord, 150, 

(174,) 199. 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 156. 
Browne, William, (86.) 
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 

(187.) 

Browning, Robert, 176, 187, 

Brunne, Robert of, 47. 
Bryant, William Cullen, (179.) 
Brunswick, House of, 14. 
Bulwer, Sir Edward L., 171, 
(185.) 

Bunyan, John, 54, (92,) 94, 

98, 125, 202. 
Biirger, 145. 

Burke, Edmund, 128, (140,) 
^ 143. 151- 

Burnet, Gilbert, (103.) 
Burns, Robert, (139,) 143. 
Butler, Samuel, (99,) no. 
Byles, Mather, 1^0. 



Byron, Lord, 146, (149,) 160, 

162, 175, 193. 
Byron, his opinion of Gibbon, 

139- 

Caedmon, his poem, (34.) 
Caesar, Julius, 10. 
Campbell, Thomas, (157,) 

161, 162. 
Canterbury Tales described, 

56. 

Carew, Thomas, 202. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 29, 168, 176, 

(180,) 199. 
Caroline, Queen, 174. 
Catholic Church, the Roman, 

52. 

Cavaliers and Roundheads, 
13- 

Caxton, William, 12. 
Celts, 9. 

Celts, Gauls, Belgians, etc., 
16. 

Celtic languages, 23. 
Chalmers, Dr. Thomas, 132. 
Charity made fashionable by 

Dickens, T92. 
Charles I. beheaded, 14, 83, 

84, 85. 

Charles II., 13, 14, 28, 85, 

96-98. 
Charles X., 165. 
Charts, Immature English, 30. 
Languages of Europe, 
23- 

Mature English, 67. 

Chaucer, 12, (55,) 201. 

Chauncey, Charles, 130. 

Cheke, Sir John, (62.) 

Chronicle, the Saxon, {35.) 

City life illustrated by Dick- 
ens, 191. 

Classical style forsaken, 145. 

Classification of literature into 
periods never exact, 25. 

Coffee houses, no. 



224 



Index, 



Coffee House, Will's, 202. 
Coleridge, S. T., 74, 146, 148, 

149, {154,) 157, 168, 175. 
Collier, Jeremy, (107,) no. 
Collins, William, (121.) 
Colonial Period in America, 

130. 

Comedy, the first English, 63. 
Commonwealth, the, 13, 85. 
Conflicts between Romanic 

and Teutonic languages in 

England, 38. 
Congreve, William, 107, (109.) 
Constantinople captured, 50, 

138. 

Cooper, James Fenimore, 171, 

(178.) 

Cophetua, King, story of, 163. 
Council of Trent, 70. 
Cowley, Abraham, (87.) 
Cowper, William, 123, (141,) 

I43> 144- 
Cowper endeavors to bring 

poetry back to truth and 

nature, 139. 
Coverdale, Miles, 64. 
Crabbe, George, (151,) 162, 

163. 

Craik, Dr. G- L., v., 38, 149, 
168. 

Cranmer, Thomas, (62.) 
Crashaw, 190. 
Cressy, battle of, 12. 
Criticism, an early specimen 
of, 71- 

Cromwell, Oliver, 84, 97, 104, 
202. 

Cudworth, Ralph, (92,) 94. 
Curtis, George William, 
(197), 199- 

Danes invade England, 11. 
Dante, 50, 51. 

Davenant, Sir William, (89.) 
Dead English, 26, 45-48. 



Declaration of Independence, 

Definition of terms, 16-22. 
Defoe, Daniel, 112, (114.) 
Dennie, Joseph, 131. 
Dickens, Charles, 171, (191.) 
Distribution of languages, 24. 
Doddridge, 119. 
Donne, John, (78,) 202. 
Drayton, Michael, (77.) 
Drummond, William, (86,) 94. 
Dryden, John, 84, (100,) 107, 

no, 144, 202. 
Duns Scotus, 37. 
Dwight, Timothy, 131, (142.) 

Education, public, in England, 
168. 

Edward III., his wars, 49. 
Edward III. invades France, 
12. 

Edwards, Jonathan, 130, (131,) 
143- 

Egbert, first King of England, 
II. 

Elegance and finish, age of, 
113- 

Elizabeth, Queen, 13, 201. 
Elizabethan Age, 67. 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 168, 

(182,) 199. 
Emigrants from Angela, 16. 
English History, outline of, 9. 
English Literature, its charms, 

iv. 

English mind active at an 
early period, 31. 

Enlightenment of the pres- 
ent generation in England, 
168. 

Erasmus, 61. 

Erckmann-Chatrian, 77. 

Erskine, Henry, 161. 

Etheridge, Sir George, (99,) 
no. 



Index, 



22$ 



Euphuism, origin of the term, 
73- 

Evelyn, John, (102,) 202. 
Everett, Edward, 160. 
Explanation of titles, 220. 

Fact illustrated in Thackeray's 

novels, 190. 
Female authorship, 171. 
Fichte, 145, 181. 
Fielding, Henry, (120,) 190. 
Fletcher, 202. 
Ford, John, (81.) 
Fox, Charles James, 161. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 130, (136.) 
Freeman, E. A., referred to, 

10. 

Frenau, Philip, 131. 
French influence, 28, 96-1 11. 
French influence on English 

Literature, 166, 167. 
Frisia, 17, 23. 
Froissart, Jean, 152. 
Froude, James Anthony, 29, 

(i95>) 199- 
Fuller, Thomas, (87,) 94, 156, 
201. 

Gaels of Scotland, Ireland, and 
Wales, 16. 

Garrick, David, 128. 

Garrison, William Lloyd, 169. 

Gay, John, iii. (115.) 

George IV., 15, 173, 176. 

George IV., his character, 
164, 165. 

German influence on English 
Literature, 166, 167, 180, 
181, 183. 

Germany and France influ- 
ence English Literature, 
144. 

Gibbon, Edward, 128, (138,) 
143- 

Gleemen or bards, 31, 200. 



Gleeman depicted by Morley, 
32. 

Godwin, 176. 

Goethe, 155, 166. 

Golden Age, 67. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, 14, (133,) 

143, 144, 148, 174. 
Gothic or Teutonic languages, 

23- 

Goths and Vandals, 10. 
Gower, John, (57,) 201. 
Grattan, Henry, 161. 
Gray, Thomas, (132,) 143, 144. 
Graydon, Alexander, 131. 
Greek, an early student of, 61. 
Gregory XL, Pope, 54. 
Grosseteste, Robert, (47,) 200. 
Grote, George, 190. 
Grub Street, 125, 126, 128. 
Guardian, the, 106, 109. 
Guiccioli, Countess, 151. 
Guizot, M., 164. 

Hall, Robert, 131. 

Hallam, Henry, 60, 78, 79, 

(173.) 199. 
Hamilton, Alexander, 131. 
Hamilton, Sir William, (177,) 

199. 

Hastings, battle of, 11. 
Havelock, General, 190. 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 171, 

(183.) 
Hazlitt, William, 176. 
Heber, Reginald, 119. 
Hengist and Horsa, 11. 
Henry IV., V., VL, 12. 
Henry VIL, 13. 
Henry VIIL, 67, 68, 195. 
Heptarchy, the Saxon, 10. 
Herbert, George, (80,) 179. 
High Church movement in 

England, 179. 
History of England, outline 

of, 9. 



226 



Index, 



Historical writings, 29. 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 

(187,) 199. 
Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, 

91. 

Hood, Thomas, (157,) 158, 
162. 

Hooker, Richard, (73,) 179. 
Hopkins, Mark, (182.) 
Hopkins, Samuel, 131. 
Hopkinson, Joseph, 131. 
Hume, David, 125,(134,) 168. 
Hunt, James Henry Leigh, 

(1750 
Hunt, John, 175. 
Hutchinson. Thomas, 130. 
Hymns, Watts's, 118. 
Hymns, by Addison, 106. 
Hymns of other writers, 119. 

Iceland, literature of, 198. 

Imaginative literature culti- 
vated, 71. 

Immature English, 25, 30-66. 

Independence, Declaration of, 
131. 

Infidelity not able to produce 
the highest sort of litera- 
ture, 139. 

Influence of the people, 28, 
112-203. 

Irving, Edward, 180. 

Irving, Washington, 171, 
(174,) 203. 

Italian influence, 27, 67, 166. 

Jackson, Andrew, 169. 
Jacobites, the, 113. 
Jakobi, 145, 155. 
Jamestown settled, 14. 
Jay, John, 131. 
Jefferson, Thomas, 131. 
Jeffreys, Judge, 14, 95. 
Jeffrey, Lord, 161. 
Johnson, Age of, 28. 



Johnson, Samuel, 79, 126, 

128, {135,) 136, 141, 143, 

145, 151, 202. 
Johnson, Samuel, of Columbia 

College, 130. 
Jonson, Ben, 74, (80,) 87, 94, 

201. 

Joseph of Arimathea, 59. 
Jutes, and their home, 1 7. 

Kant, Emanuel, 145, 155, 168. 
Keats, John, 175. 
Keble, John, (178.) 
Klopstock, 145. 
Knowledge, diffusion of, 145. 
Knox, John, (64,) 65. 

Lake School, 146, 155, 159. 
Lamb, Charles, (155,) 175. 
Lancaster, House of, 12. 
Landor, Walter Savage, (173-) 
Langton, Bennet, 128. 
Languages of Europe, 23-24. 
Latimer, Hugh, (61,) 201. 
Latin language much used by 

early English writers, 31. 
Layamon's Brut, (42.) 
Lear and his daughters, 42. 
Leech, John, 190. 
Legislation improved by Ben- 

tham, 151. 
Lessing, 145. 

Letter-writing, Cowper excels 

in, 142. 
Lincoln, Abraham, 169. 
Linguistics defined, 18. 
Light literature developed, 

145. 

Literary Club, Dr. Johnson's, 

128, 202. 
Literature defined, 18. 
Literature, the best, ought to 

be studied, 170. 
Locke, John, (loi.) 
Lollards, the, 201. 



Index. 



227 



Longfellow, Henry Wads- 
worth, 184, (185,) 199. 

Louis XIV., 96. 

Lowell, James Russell, (196,) 
199. 

Lundy, Benjamin, 169. 
Lyly, John, (73.) 
Lyte, Henry Francis, 119. 
Lvtton, Edward Bulwer, Lord, 
'171, (185.) 

Macbeth, 13, 74. 

Macaulay, T. B , 29, 45, 93, 

103, 105, 128, 174. 
Mackintosh, Sir James, 130, 

161. 

Madison, James, 131. 
Magazines, the monthly, 171, 
172. 

Magna Charta, 46. 
Magnussen, E., 198. 
Maid of Orleans, 12. 
Malory, Sir Thomas, (58,) 201. 
Mandeville, John, (53.) 
Mannyng, Robert, of Brunne, 
(47.) 

Marlowe, Christopher, (71.) 

Marsh, George P., v. 

Marshall, John, 131. 

Marvel, Andrew, 84- 

Mary Stuart, 195. 

Massinger, 156. 

Metaphysical School of Poe- 
try, 79. 

Mather, Cotton, 130. 

Mather, Increase, 130. 

Mature English, 25, 67-203. 

Medieval History illustrated 
by Browning, 194. 

Mermaid Club, 81, 201. 

Migration of nations, 9. 

Milton, John, 87, 88, (89,) 94, 
152, 202. 

Missouri admitted to the 
Union, 169. 



Monks preserve literature, 39, 
200. 

Montague, Edward Wortley, 
123. 

Montague, Lady Mary, (123.) 
Montgomery, James, 119. 
Moore, Thomas, (160.) 
More, Sir Thomas, (60,) 65. 
Morley, Professor, v. 
Morris, William, ( 198.) 
Motley, John Lothrop, 29, 

(194 J 199- 
Miiller, Max, v., 30. 
Murray, Lindley, 131. 

Names, many necessarily 
omitted from this book, 
199. 

Napoleon I., 145. 
Naseby, battle of, 96. 
National spirit in American 

Literature, 172. 
New Germany, in literature, 

168. 

Newman, John Henry, 179. 
News journals, daily and 

weekly, 171, 172. 
Newton, Sir Isaac, (107.) 
Norman invasion, 11. 
North, Lord, 139. 
Novel, the English, 121. 

Object of this book, iii., 199. 
Orange, William, Prince of, 
14. 

Origin of this book, iii. 
Original English, 26, 30-36. 
Orleans, Maid of, 12. 
Ormulum, the, (42.) 
Otis, James, 131. 
Otway, Thomas, (99.) 
Owen, 125. 

Paulding, James Kirke, 175. 
Payne, Joseph, v. 



228 



Index, 



Pecocke, Bishop, (58.) 
People's influence, 28, 49, 112 
-203. 

Pepys, Samuel, (loi,) no, 
202. 

Percy, Thomas, 146, (147,) 

152, 162, 163. 
Periodical Literature, 171, 

172. 

Periods of English Literature, 

25-29. 
Petrarch, 50. 
Philippe, Louis, 165. 
Philology and its divisions, 

18. 

Philosophy, German, 168. 

Philosophy, the Baconian, 76. 

Pickering, Timothy, 131- 

Piers Plowman, Vision of, 
(54,) 201. 

Pitt, William, 165. 

Plantagenet Kings of Eng- 
land, 12. 

Plymouth settled, 14. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, (159,) 162. 

Poetical Romance, Age of 
28, 144-163. 

Poetical Romance, Age of, re- 
viewed, 161. 

Poetry and its divisions, 19, 
20. 

Poetry and prose, 171. 

Poetry, why used before 
prose, 31. 

Poictiers, battle of 12. 

Political discussion in Amer- 
ica, 131. 

Political economy, 137. 

Political tranquillity of our 
age, 171. 

Pope, Age of, 28. 

Pope, Alexander, (115,) 119, 
120, 123, 125, 139, 144. 

Popes, Gregory XL 54. 
Leo X., 27. 



Post, the New York Even- 
ing, 180. 

Preachers of religion promote 
learning, 37. 

Presbyterianism in Scotland, 
66. 

Prescott, William Hickling, 

29, (i8i.) 
Priestly, Dr. Joseph, 151. 
Prince, Thomas, 130. 
Princeton College, 132. 
Printing invented, 50. 
Printing-press, the first in 

England, 12. 
Printing-press, its power, 70. 
Progress in England, 69. 
Progress of our age, 171. 
Pronunciation explained, 220. 
Prose and its divisions, 20-22. 
Prose and poetry, 171. 
Prose Romance, Age of, 28, 

164-203. 
Puritan influence, 27, 83-95. 
Puritans and Royalists, 13. 
Pusey, Dr. Edward B., 179. 

Quarles, Francis, (86,) 93. 
Quincy, Josiah, Jr., 131. 
Quincey, Thomas De, 146, 
(176,) 199. 

Railways, the beginnings of, 
166. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 74, 201. 
Ramsey, Allan, 13, 91, (122.) 
Reade, Charles, 171. 
Readers, remarkable increase 

of, 169. 
Reid, Dr. Thomas, 177. 
Reign of Terror in France, 

145- . 

Reformation, the, in Ger- 
many, 50. 

Reform Bill, the, passed, 
168. 



Index, 



229 



Reform, debate on, in Eng- 
land, 165. 

Relations of France, England, 
and Germany in respect to 
literature, 166. 

Religious discussions in 
America, 130. 

Restoration, Period of, 85, 97, 
166. 

Review, Defoe's, 115. 
Reviews, the quarterly, 171, 
172. 

Revival of letters, 69, 70. 
Reviving English, 26, 49-66. 
Revolution, the American, 
14. 

Revolution, the French, of 

1830, 164. 
Revolution in the language of 

England, 38. 
Revolutionary Period in 

America, 130, 131. 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 128. 
Richardson, Samuel, (121,) 

125, 190. 
Richter, Jean Paul, 181. 
Ridley, John, 61. 
Rittenhouse, David, 131. 
Robertson, William, (137), 

143- 

Robespierre, 145. 
Robinson Crusoe, 202. 
Rogers, Samuel, 159, (161,) 
162. 

Rome sacked, 10. 
Roman rule in Britain, 10. 
Romanic languages, 23. 
Romantic school in Germany, 
168. 

Romantic style adopted, 145. 
Roses, Wars of the, 13. 
Rosetti, Dante Gabriel, 199. 
Round Table romances, ii, 

42, 59, 148, 185, 189, 196, 

201. 



Roundheads and Cavaliers, 13. 
Royalists and Puritans, 13. 
Ruskin, John, (195,) 199. 
Russell, Lord John, 165. 

Satirical romance, 65. 

Saxon heptarchy, 10. 

Sevigne, Madame de, 123. 

Scott's novels classified, 153. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 29, 122, 
146, 148, (152,) 157, 159, 
161, 162, 163, 170, 174, 203. 

Scotus, Duns, 37. 

Science of language, 19. 

Schelling, F. W. J., 155, 168. 

Schiller, 145, 181. 

Scholastics, the, 37, 46. 

Scriptures reverenced by Ba- 
con, 46. 

Selden, John, (82,) 99. 

Senlac, battle of, 11. 

Sensational and empty writ- 
ing popular, 170. 

Shakespeare, William, 51, 

(73O 75. 81. 148, 152, 154, 

191, 201. 
Shaw, Thomas B., v., 91. 
Shedd, Prof. W. G. T., 155. 
Shelley, Percy B., (148,) 162, 

175- 

Sheridan, Richard B. B., 
161. 

Sidney, Sir Philip, (76,) 71. 
Skelton, John, (61). 
Slavery abolished in England, 
169. 

Slavery abolished in the Uni- 
ted States, 169. 

Slavery in the United States, 
186.^ 

Slavonic languages, 24. 
Smith, Adam, (137,) 143. 
Smith, Sydney, (158,) 161. 
Smollett, Tobias George, 
(124,) 190. 



230 



htdex. 



Solid literature, its circula- 
tion, 172. 

Southey, Robert, 142, 146, 148, 
(156,) 157, 162, 176. 

South, Robert, (103,) 104. 

Spectator, the, 106, 109, 139, 
148. 

Spenser, Edmund, (71,) 117, 

140, 152. 
Stael, Madame de, 161. 
Steele, Anne, 119. 
Steele, Sir Richard, (108,) 120, 

190. 

Sterne, Laurence, (124.) 
Stewart, Dugald, 132. 
Stiles, Ezra, 130. 
Stowe, Calvin E., 192. 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 151, 

(192.) 
Strong literature, 199. 
Stuart and Nassau, House of, 

14. 

Stuart, the House of, 13. 
Swift, Jonathan, 61, (116,) 119, 

120, 158. 
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 

199. 

Table Talk of Dr. Johnson, 
129. 

Tatler, the, 106, 108, 112. 

Taylor, Jeremy, (88,) 94, 156. 

Telegraph, the electric, be- 
ginning of, 166. 

Tennyson, Alfred, 59, 148, 
(188,) 194, 199- 

Terms defined, 16-22. 

Terror, Reign of, 14. 

Teutonic race, its branches, 
17. 

Thackeray, William Make- 
peace, ( 190.) 
Thinkers, increase of, 170. 
Thinkers, their needs, 170. 
Thomson, James, (117.) 
Titles explained, 220. 



Toplady, A. M., 119. 
Tories and Whigs, 166. 
Toryism, downfall of, 167. 
Trent, Council of, 70. 
Trumbull, John, 131. 
Tudor, the House of, 13. 
Tuisco, 17. 

Udall, Nicholas, (63.) 
United States, increase of in- 
telligence in, 169. 
Uralic languages, 24. 
Usher, Archbishop, 82. 
Utopia, meaning of, 60. 

Vanbrugh, Sir John, (106,) 

107, no. 
Vandals and Goths, 10. 
Vespucci, Amerigo, 60. 
Victoria becomes queen, 15. 
Voltaire, his infidelity, 148. 
Waller, Edmund, 84, (91.) 
Walpole, Horace, 123. 
Walton, Isaac, 78. 
War of 1 812 in America, 14. 
Washington, George, 131. 
Waterloo, battle of^ described 

by Thackeray, 191. 
Watts, his influence, 118, 119. 
Watts, Isaac, (117,) 125, 202. 
Wayland, Francis, (181, J) 199. 
Webster, Daniel, (160.) 
Wellington, Duke of, 161, 164. 
Wesley, John, 190. 
Wesleys, the, 119. 
Whately, Richard, (177,) 199. 
Whigs and Tories, 166. 
Whipple, E. P., his Essays, 

73. 

Whitehall, palace of, 83. 
Whitney, William Dwight, v. 
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 

(186), 199. 
Wiclif, John, 12, (53,) 58,201. 
Wieland, 145. 

William, Prince of Orange, 14. 



hidex. 



231 



William the Conqueror, 11. 
Wilson, John, 146. 
Wirt, William, 131. 
Wither, George, (88.) 
Wolsey, Cardinal, 60. 
Worcester, Noah, 131. 
Wordsworth, Rev- Charles, 

74- 

Wordsworth, William, 146, 
148, {159^) i^i' ^^2' ^76- 



Writers, thoughtful, encour- 
aged, 170. 

Wycherley, Wilham, (102,) 
109, no, III. 

Yale College, 130, 132, H^- 
York, House of, 12. 



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